Gavagai Monitor Tutorial, Part 2: Targets

Owned by Nina Viereckel
Last updated: Oct 22, 2015
4 min read

This is a basic tutorial series for using Gavagai Monitor.

Creating a Target

Let's start by creating a target we want to track. You can think of a target as you would think of the main character of a movie or the brand featured in a commercial. It could be a person, place, brand, or something more abstract like flu symptoms or the name of a country.

  1. On the start page, locate your (probably empty) list of targets. Click on "Create Target".
  2. Now you can set some basic properties of your target. Choose a name and language, then click on "Show Suggestions" to proceed to the next step. As an example, let's see what people write about the Oktoberfest in English.
  3. On the next page, you can choose and enter target terms to define your target.  For the Oktoberfest, it should be sufficient to use some of the suggested terms: Let's make sure that oktoberfest, #oktoberfest, and the spelling variant octoberfest are active. Click on the switches to activate a term.
    It is also possible to add terms that are not shown in the suggestions by entering them into the text box and clicking on the "+" button or pressing the enter / return key to confirm.
    Let's also add the terms #octoberfest, octoberfest's, oktoberfest's to cover all variants of the word.  Additionally, you can add the name of the official twitter account @octoberfest.
  4. If you scroll down, you will see some other properties of your target, called "Filters". Filter terms will help us disambiguate the right texts from the selection made by the target terms above. There are two types of filters - include terms and exclude terms. Let's say we only want to know about the actual Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany. We can filter the results by adding the terms munich, munich's, as well as the German variants münchen and münchen's, to the set of include terms. Another possibility would be to add all the locations we don't want to know about to the set of exclude terms, but this does not seem feasible in this case, so we will ignore this filter for now.
  5. Below the filters, you will see some example documents based on your target terms and filters. Check them out to see what kind of documents your target will collect.
  6. Click on "Save Target" to save the target. You will be asked if you want to insert the target into a sector, but since we haven't learned about sectors yet, you can ignore this part. Click on "Go back to My Page" to return to the start page. 


Think well about your target terms. Don't forget to add alternative forms of your terms, such as corresponding nouns, adjectives, verbs, or genitive and plural forms (e.g., economy, economical, economy's, economies). In other languages than English, you should also think about verb and adjective inflections, case, or compounding.

Editing and deleting a Target

  • To edit a target, go to the start page and locate it. Click on "Edit" and you will be taken to the "Edit Target" page. Here you can change the target's name, add and remove target terms, and add and remove filter include and exclude terms. In case the target is only visible within a sector, locate it on the "Edit Sector" page and click on the name of the target to edit it. Don't forget to save your changes!
  • To delete a target, go to the start page and locate it. Click on "Delete" and confirm with "Yes". In case the target is only visible within a sector, locate it on the "Edit Sector" page and click the "x" button to remove it from the sector, which will also delete it.

Next Steps

  • Your target will now begin to collect data. But keep in mind that while Monitor starts looking for discussion about your targets right after they have been created, it may take some time before there is something interesting to see. If there are plenty of mentions about your target, you may see results after only a few hours, so come back and have a look!
  • You can go to the next part of the tutorial series: Gavagai Monitor Tutorial, Part 3: Sectors