Harvesting Ego-Network Data from Facebook: Using the CEMAP Facebook Profile in ORA

摘要

The Facebook social networking site has become a popular phenomenon over the past five years. By its nature, Facebook has attracted the attention of social network researchers and enthusiasts as a rich source of data for scholarly study or personal self-analysis. It is fitting that the CEMAP software-tool, hosted by the CASOS software suite, has functionality to aid in the harvesting of Facebook data into the CASOS software, in particular, into the ORA social network analysis tool. CEMAP is designed to interface with real-world data platforms and data formats in an abstract manner that greatly reduces the need for ORA users to understand and deal with the plethora of complex technologies and data-file formats. This report introduces the CEMAP Facebook profile and provides instruction on how to use the profile--so as to easily load an individual's Facebook ego-network into ORA. We provide step-by-step instructions and illustrations as well as a description on the technology underlying the Facebook tableset. The Facebook tableset is the CEMAP abstraction of the various levels of technology to harvest the social network data, via the Facebook developer platform.