MeCoDEM’s open-source tool for simplifying big data analysis and visualization
Mecodify (Al-Saqaf, 2016) has been developed as an open source tool that can be used by everybody interested in analysing social media data. It emerged out of MeCoDEM’s work package “ICTs and democratisation conflicts“, as a tool to allow MeCoDEM’s social science researchers to extract, analyse and visualise tweets in relation to the MeCoDEM research programme. Mecodify is an open source tool that can be used by everybody interested in analysing social media data.
What is Mecodify for?
Mecodify can be used by researchers to measure the usage of twitter hashtags for example. It can also be used to compare real events with twitter activity. Since Mecodify has a way to connect twitter users with each other using mentions and replies, it can also be used to do some network analysis to identify influential tweeters involved in a particular subject.
Mecodify’s interface was built in such a way that allows users to utilise its service without having to learn coding or acquire any technical skills. If you have not worked on big data analysis before or have no technical experience in this area, we believe that you will find using MeCodify simple and effective:
- Tables & graphs
You can use it to extract, analyse and visualise data in the form of tables and graphs with timelines and many features such as overlays and flags. - Useful filters
By providing a set of filters, Mecodify makes it is possible to inspect data thoroughly and focus on different segments of interest and create graphs. - Network analysis
While the timeline graph gives details of messages over time, one can also plot graphs of users and analyse relationships that emerge from the data.
Note: Mecodify is in its initial stages and currently only supports Twitter but aims at expanding to support other platforms that have APIs for data extraction.
Download
You can download MeCodify from its GitHub repository, where you can find all the tutorials and instructions for smooth installation and effective use: github.com/wsaqaf/mecodify
Contact admin@mecodify.org for more information.
Demo
Go to mecodify.org/demo/ to see a free demo of a couple of cases that were pre-loaded. At the login page, simply use ‘demo@mecodify.org’ as username and password.
Volunteer
The project remains in its infancy, so if you wish to volunteer your time by coding, testing, helping us get funding, or any other ideas, we would love to hear from you. Kindly contact admin@mecodify.org and we’ll take it from there.
Subscribe
Sign up for our free subscription to get the latest updates and improvements. We’d appreciate keeping a connection with you as we move forward. To subscribe, simply send an email to admin@mecodify.org with the subject “Subscribe”.
Mecodify applied
Mecodify has already been applied by a broad range of users both within and outside academia. A selection of publications can be found here.