Who Is Behind Mining the Social Web and What Is the Third Edition About?

Updated

Mining the Social Web is a technical book project originally authored by Matthew Russell, with Mikhail Klassen joining as co-author for the third edition. According to the site, the third edition was an overhaul of the book that involved modernizing the code and testing it, a project that began around PyCon 2016 and took unexpected turns as social media platforms changed their APIs and data access policies.

The People Behind the Book

  • Matthew Russell — the original author of Mining the Social Web.
  • Mikhail Klassen — brought on as co-author for the third edition. He had recently defended a PhD in astrophysics and was shifting his interests toward machine learning and data science when he met an O'Reilly Media editor at PyCon 2016 in Portland, Oregon. He was invited to follow up after the conference and ended up joining the project.

What the Third Edition Involved

The initial plan, as described on the site, was fairly contained:

  • Modernize the code to Python 3.
  • Test everything to make sure the code still ran.

Klassen had done some data mining work with Twitter before, so he agreed. The site notes that the project "ended up taking some interesting turns."

Why the Project Changed Course

The site explains that the two years following 2016 brought major shifts in the social media landscape:

  • The Cambridge Analytica scandal and other major data breaches put social media under much more scrutiny.
  • All the major platforms "went on the defensive."
  • APIs were changed and access to data was severely curtailed.
  • Certain privileges began to require approval from the platform's developers.

Because the book was full of examples designed to teach data mining techniques and help readers build applications, these changes directly affected much of the code — the site's excerpt cuts off mid-sentence at "Suddenly a lot of the code no lo…", so the full consequences aren't spelled out in the available text.

What You'll Find on the Site

The site frames itself around "Transforming Curiosity into Insight" and includes blog posts such as:

  • "Rebooting Mining the Social Web for a Rapidly Changing World" (posted January 27, 2019)
  • "How To Mine Your GMail with Google Takeout and MongoDB"
  • "Twitter Data Mining Round Up"

These posts document the rebooting process and offer practical mining walkthroughs, which makes the site useful both as background on the book and as a companion to its techniques.