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Twarc is a Python tool that comes along with 47 small python utilities for harvesting and working with data from the Twitter public API.
It’s important to note that there are limitations in the extent to which you can anylyze Twitter data using twarc. As such, many projects incorporate other tools of analysis such as with MAXQDA. Twarc is just a stepping stool for analysis. What you decide to do with the data you’ve collected and cleaned is where analysis really takes place. Of course, twarc does offer several visualization tools but don’t limit yourself to those tools.
The twarc readme is fairly comprehensive (check out the resources page for links and help). If you are comfortable running Python scripts, and have a usable installation with pip, you should be able to get up and running quickly. If not, you’ll still be able to get it up and running, it just might take a little more time and effort.
This guide concentrates on running the individual twarc utilities.
Twitter has just released an updated version of its API which is only available as early access for academic research. While it is in the developmental phase, v1.1 is still available for use. As such, this guide concerns the implementation of twarc, not twarc2. We hope to integrate the new API as it is developed, but we will keep the documentation on the older version until Twitter removes v1.1.