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Instagram Hashtag Explorer is a small script that connects to the Instagram API with a user's credentials, retrieves either the latest media tagged with a specified term (via the /tags/../media/recent API call) or media around a particular location (via the /media/search API call), and creates:
- a tabular file containing a list of media with losts of meta-information;
- a tabular file with information on the users related to those media (additional information is retrieved via this API call;
- a co-tag file (GDF format) to analyze e.g. in gephi;
This tool is meant for research and requires familiarity with tools for data analysis. For a more thorough introduction, check out this video.
This script is written and maintained by Bernhard Rieder, Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and researcher with the Digital Methods Initiative.
It uses uses the PHP Instagram API wrapper by Christian Metz.
You do not have to install this software to use it. There is a running version here. But if you want your own installation:
This script requires a web server (tested: Apache on Linux) with PHP installed (tested: 5.3 and 5.4). The basic steps to install the script are:
- download all the files and move them to a publicly accessible directory in your server environment (e.g. http://yourserver.com/instagram/);
- in the same directory create a folder named "data" and make sure that the script has the permissions to write to it;
- register the script with Instagram (https://instagram.com/developer/clients/manage/) and make sure that the website URL is your public directory (e.g. http://yourserver.com/instagram/) and the redirect URI points to success.php (e.g. http://yourserver.com/instagram/success.php);
- copy the client ID and client secret to conf_example.php and rename it to conf.php;
If this does not work, please contact your institution's tech support for help and not the author.
The query interface:
