  Social media data is now widely used by many academic researchers. However,
long-term social media data collection projects, which most typically involve
collecting data from public-use APIs, often encounter issues when relying on
local-area network servers (LANs) to collect high-volume streaming social media
data over long periods of time. In this technical report, we present a
cloud-based data collection, pre-processing, and archiving infrastructure, and
argue that this system mitigates or resolves the problems most typically
encountered when running social media data collection projects on LANs at
minimal cloud-computing costs. We show how this approach works in different
cloud computing architectures, and how to adapt the method to collect streaming
data from other social media platforms.
