Twitter Data Mining Round Up

Since the release of Mining the Social Web, 2E in late October of last year, I have mostly focused on creating supplemental content that focused on Twitter data. This seemed like a natural starting point given that the first chapter of the book is a gentle introduction to data mining with Twitter’s API coupled with the inherent openness of accessing and analyzing Twitter data (in comparison to other data sources that are a little more restrictive.) Twitter’s IPO late last year also focused the spotlight a bit on Twitter, which provided some good opportunities to opine on Twitter’s underlying data model that can be interpreted as an interest graph.

Throughout the remainder of this coming year, I hope to spend much less time on Twitter and systematically work through the myriad other topics in the book: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, email, web pages, etc. However, before changing course, it seemed useful to provide a consolidated reference of the existing Twitter-related content.

Blog Posts

• Every MTSW blog post that’s tagged with “twitter” (and there are quite a few of them)

IPython Notebooks

• The full-text of Mining the Social Web 2E, Chapter 1 (pdf version; html version)
• Extracted examples from MTSW 2E, Chapter 1
• Extracted examples from MTSW 2E, Chapter 9 (Twitter Cookbook)
• A primer on using pandas to understand the reaction to the Amazon Prime Air announcement with Twitter’s Streaming API (the “firehose”)
• An analysis of of some “celebrity” Twitter accounts (Tim O’Reilly, Lady Gaga, and Marissa Mayer)

Excerpts & Presentations

• Data Journalism and Interactivity (Quito, Ecuador; September, 2013)
• Why Twitter Is All the Rage: A Data Miner’s Perspective (Webinar; October 2013)
• Mining Social Web APIs with IPython Notebook (New York City; October 2013)
• Data Day Texas Presentation (Austin, TX; January 2014)
• Mining the Social Web for Fun and Profit: A Getting Started Guide (Nashville, TN; February 2014)
• Why Is Twitter All the Rage? (book excerpt)

Videos

• Getting Started with Twitter’s API
• Why Twitter Is All the Rage: A Data Miner’s Perspective
• Data Science Experiments with Twitter and IPython Notebook (Understanding the Reaction to Amazon Prime Air with pandas)

While there are plenty of other great links out there on the web about data mining with Twitter, these are a few that I am particularly proud to have produced. I hope you enjoy them.

Stay in touch and feel free to reach out with any suggestions or requests about future content.