We will be running a launch event and workshop for a new software tool that we have created called FireAnt. The event and workshop will be held from 13:00 to 17:00 on Monday 22^nd February 2016 here at Lancaster University.

FireAnt was created by Laurence Anthony as part of the 2015 ESRC-funded CASS-affiliated DOOM project on social media analysis. FireAnt is a free and easy-to-use tool designed to help corpus linguists and social scientists analyze Twitter and other social network data without the need for programming or database management skills. The following features of the tool will be explored in this workshop:

• import different formats of data (e.g. Twitter data in JSON format, Reddit data in CSV format, etc.)
• search that data and its associated metadata in a variety of ways (e.g., retrieve all tweets containing #blacklivesmatter sent in December 2015)
• export the results to other formats including a plain text file for “standard” corpus analysis, an Excel/CSV file for statistical analysis, a timeline chart, and a network graph

We will be providing lunch at the start of the event and all materials for the workshop (including the software and help guide) on a USB drive. The schedule for the day can be found below.

SCHEDULE

Please note that places are extremely limited and must be booked in advance. If you would like to attend, please email Claire Hardaker (c.hardaker@lancaster.ac.uk) in the first instance.