In this chapter, we introduced readers to the concepts of social media, sentiment analysis, and Big Data. We described how social media has changed the nature of interpersonal communication and the opportunities it presents for analysts of social data. This chapter also made a case for the use of quantitative approaches to measure all that is measurable, and make the one which is not so measurable.

In the next chapter, we will introduce R, which is the main tool through which we will illustrate techniques for harvesting, analyzing, and visualizing social media data.