Dr James Ashford

Research Associate, Network Analysis, Social Media and Programming


Modelling Discussion Threads From Mastodon Timelines Using Python and Networkx

On Mastodon, users have the ability to reply to another user's post by leaving comments as a response. This feature is designed to encourage users to engage and build connections with others. With...

Building User-Hashtag Co-occurrence Network from Timelines on Mastodon

Hashtags are an incredibly useful feature for annotating posts and have an active role on microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Mastodon. They are particularly helpful for discovering new peo...

How to Scrape Mastodon Timelines Using Python and Pandas

Over the past few months, Mastodon, the Federated microblogging alternative to Twitter, has gained a lot of attraction in light of the events going on surrounding Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. U...

Interacting With REST APIs in Python With 5 Lines of Code

An essential skill for any web scraper or data scientist is to know how to collect information from a publicly available REST API. In short, a REST API is a very s...

Loading Data into Pandas: 5 Tips and Tricks You May or May Not Know

If you've ever worked with Pandas in Python before, you'll know that there are a bunch of different ways in which you can import tabulated data.

Pandas is perhaps one of the most widely used...