Using the Tumblr API

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking platform. Tumblr, as of August 2015, hosts around 248 million blogs and about 117 billion posts, and over 75 million posts are created on a daily basis. In this section, we will see how to access the data from Tumblr and, in the process, understand how the steps involved are different from the methodology discussed so far.

There is a package in R that allows interaction with Tumblr. We need to install the package tumblR. The package has little dependency, so use the following code for installation:

install.packages("tumblR")
install.packages("base64enc")
install.packages("httpuv")
library(tumblR)

The preceding code installs the related packages, as well as loads the required package on to the working environment.

We need to have an account in Tumblr and have the app for enabling authentication in order to access the data. Once we create the app, we get the consumer key and the secret key. We can use these to access the data...