Introduction
Around the world the internet has become a powerful tool for communication. Email, forums, blogs, and social networks all work to bring people together, to disseminate information, and to foster societal change. Social networks also provide insight into current events as people post their opinions, quotes, information, and misinformation. Twitter is a prime example of this.
This project will examine Twitter as a snapshot of current events. By capturing Twitter data on the fly, a snapshot of the internet during major events can be captured and analyzed. For the purpose of this project that data will be analyzed for keywords, sorted by user name and time posted, and assigned to 3D space to create a physical map of the event. The eventual goal is to begin analyzing networks created through Twitter by people reposting tweets and commenting on each others tweets. The 3D space will be converted into a format suitable for 3D printing so a physical artifact representing an event can be created.
Please check the blog for the project's current status
Read my mid-term report here.
Acknowledgements go to Stacy Waters for his support throughout the term and his help with learning the power of Unix in managing text files. Don Craig for getting me started with Processing. Erin the Robotgrrl for her Simple Processing Twitter code, and implementation of the Twitter4J Java library for Processing, as well as her periodic support over Twitter. And Greg Williams for his help with the structure and functionality of my code.