Mining the Social Web with Matthew Russell
This week's episode explores the possibilities of extracting novel insights from the many great social web APIs available. Matthew Russell's\xa0Mining the Social Web\xa0is a fantastic exploration of the tools and methods, and we explore a few related topics.
One helpful feature of the book is it's use of a\xa0Vagrant\xa0virtual machine. Using it, readers can easily reproduce the examples from the book, and there's a short video available that will walk you through\xa0setting up the Mining the Social Web virtual machine.
The book also has an accompanying github repository which can be found\xa0here.
A quote from Matthew that particularly reasonates for me was "The first commandment of Data Science is to 'Know thy data'." Take a listen for a little more context around this sage advice.
In addition to the book, we also discuss some of the work done by\xa0Digital Reasoning\xa0where Matthew serves as CTO. One of their products we spend some time discussing is\xa0Synthesys, a service that processes unstructured data and delivers knowledge and insight extracted from the data.
Some listeners might already be familiar with Digital Reasoning from recent coverage in Fortune Magazine on their\xa0cognitive computing\xa0efforts.
For his benevolent recommendation, Matthew recommends the\xa0Hardcore History Podcast, and for his self-serving recommendation, Matthew mentioned that they are currently hiring for\xa0Data Science job opportunities at Digital Reasoning\xa0if any listeners are looking for new opportunities.