Why your Twitter analysis sucks – and what you can do about it

I'll start with my favourite word in the English language. My colleagues, friends, and students are at the point of rolling their eyes when I say it. But it is so important and the main reason your Twitter analysis sucks. What do I mean by context? If you are going to datafy something – turn a tweet, a representation of a thought, emotion, idea into data –, then you need to think about the context of a) the user and why they tweeted, b) the dataset you are looking at, c) the problem you are trying to solve by datafying that tweet in the first place, and d) the tools you are using.