Accessing the Twitter Historical API via the Academic Track

NodeXL Pro has recently been updated to include support for Twitter API 2.0 and the Academic Twitter API service.

Via the Twitter API 2.0 any Twitter user has “essential access” to 500k Tweets per month, restricted to the past seven days before the date of the query.  It is also possible to upgrade to 2 million tweets per month when applying for “elevated access”.

Academic researchers can also get full access to the historic database and receive up to 10 million (!) tweets per month after applying for the Twitter Academic Research Track.  Please see:

https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/academic-research

The new importer is now present in the menu: NodeXL Pro > Data > Import >  Twitter Search Network 2.0 (Beta):

Please note the new Query Builder!  This feature helps create advanced queries that leverage all the different search operators (be sure to scroll down to see them all!).  For more information on query design please have a look at the official Twitter documentation.

One very cool new feature of the API v2 is the availability of discussions related to a single tweet using the “conversation_ID:” search operator which needs to be extended with the tweet ID (example: conversation_id:1579971705447256064) to collect all replies to a tweet.  Here is an example of discussions around a tweet by Elon Musk using the conversation_id operator, shown in the “normal” network layout and the resulting path layout.