For our second assignment, we were to extract data using Twitter’s API. This was an excellent exercise to become familiar with how API’s worked and what can be accomplished when using them. I did not know it was possible to take any keyword and get all of the tweets that anyone anywhere has tweeted that keyword. That blew my mind! I thought there was no way I would be able to do this assignment but once it was broken down into a few smaller pieces, it became easier than I expected.
For my keywords, I chose “Texas” and “music”. Pretty generic words but I wanted to see how people were talking about “Texas” and “music” around the world. At the time when I pulled the data, there were quite a bit of tweets using those keywords. The most frequent of the tweets was obviously in Texas, clustered around the DFW area and Central Texas. Then there were scattered tweets along the east coast and southeastern regions. Believe it or not, there was even a tweet using the words “Texas” and “music” in Berlin, Germany!
The knowledge of how to take information like this and use it in such ways that are easy to read and understand provide opportunities to create really great stories. For this assignment though, I was just learning the basics and focusing more on how the code works than the actual story I’m trying to tell, although seeing that there are quite bit of people talking about music in Texas is pretty neat. I am excited to see what else there is to do with API’s and this type of coding!