11. Jumping through Hadoops

Week one of the course introduced Apache Hadoop software, used for distributed processing of massive unstructured data, week two took us deeper into accessing and operating on big data and took me far, far away from my comfort zone. The least geeky explanations of Hadoop and MapReduce that I could find are here and here […]

10. Getting going with big data analytics

After social media analytics I signed up for this Big Data Analytics programme. Also by Queensland University of Technology, it is a series of four courses covering the collecting, storing and managing (week 1); statistical inference and machine learning (week 2); mathematical modelling (week 3) and data visualisation (week 4). (As an aside for anyone […]

8. Social media analytics: TAGS, tweets & newts

Following last week’s overview this post provides a bit more detail on the doing of social media analysis. This course ran for three weeks, each week focusing on a different aspect and using a different tool: understanding & gathering (TAGS), analysing (Tableau), and visualising with social network analysis(Gephi). As stated, the course does work for […]

7. A first attempt at social media analytics

My first, uninformed answer to the question what is big data? was ‘stuff off social media’. In particular, social media familiar to me and that is accessible – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Much of the content on Facebook or Instagram is shared ‘privately’ between users that are connected to each other in a closed network. Twitter, being a […]