accessing Facebook API from R for Text Mining

Question

I was wondering if anyone know how i could access facebook API from within R.. I would like, to access the text in my wall post, and do very basic analysis. The problem is that, aside from the fact that my knowledge of text mining is very basic, my knowledge of how to use web-api (if that is even a correct concept), is non-existing.

Assuming that i have an api-key, can someone provide me with a very basic example/code to demonstrate how i could make the connection from R to facebook, and download some data? I imagine i will need one or more R packages, such as: Rcurl, Rjson...

My main focus right now is to learn/improve my text mining skills in R, and so i don't want to get lost into/distracted by basic programing to access facebook api.

Finally, i read in the comment on a related question Update Facebook status using R? that

"...it's not like you can pull large amounts of data from Facebook to do data analysis...".

Can anyone elaborate on that?

Thanx

Answer 1

you can use Rfacebook package from following link to access Facebook API http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rfacebook/Rfacebook.pdf. Further to this, you can use advance text mining packages within R for text mining on the feed.

A more comprehensive help is here http://pablobarbera.com/blog/archives/3.html

An example on how to use it is here

http://thinktostart.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/analyzing-facebook-with-r/