Collecting Social Media Data from the Sina Weibo Api

Abstract

As part of a larger collaborative project to preserve non-official voices in China's anticorruption campaign, a team from George Washington University Libraries was tasked with collecting content from Sina Weibo, a massively popular Chinese social media site.Based on their experience developing Social Feed Manager (SFM), an open-source tool for collecting social media data to support research and constructing archives, the team added support for Sina Weibo.This paper provides introductions to both the Sina Weibo platform and the approach of collecting social media from an Application Programming Interface (API).Further, it describes SFM's support for Sina Weibo, the challenges in working with the Sina Weibo API, guidance for other institutions interested in conducting similar work, and a brief characterization of the content collected about China's anti-corruption campaign.

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