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Archive of posts with the tag

  • Ideas |

    A beginner's guide to collecting Twitter data (and a bit of web scraping)

    by Allen Zeng

    As a student fellow at the Knight Lab, I get the opportunity to work on a variety of different projects. Recently, I’ve been working with Larry Birnbaum, a Knight Lab co-founder, and Shawn O’Banion, a computer science Ph.D. student, to build an application that takes a user’s Twitter handle, analyzes their activity and returns a list of celebrities that they tweet most like. It’s not an earth-shattering project, but it is a fun way for...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    Knight Lab's MozFest 2012 wrap up

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Last week, a significant portion of the Knight Lab team was fortunate enough to join the Mozilla Festival in London, November 9-12. This incredible event, hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, is in its third year and intends to motivate an entire generation of web makers. As far as we can tell, they are doing this job well. In fact, during the Sunday morning keynote, Mozilla's executive director, Mark Surman shared an anecdote that an attendee had likened #MozFest to #SXSWi in its early...

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  • Lab projects |

    TweetCast knows (probably) who gets your vote

    by Ryan Graff

    Today the Knight Lab quietly took the wraps off a project that seeks to uncover a secret most Americans hold — who we plan to vote for in this week’s presidential election. The project, Tweet Cast Your Vote (tweetcast.knightlabproject.com), is experimental, but accurately predicts the candidate Twitter users plan to vote for up to 80 percent of the time. For now the tool is an interesting experience for the user — a sort of political...

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  • Lab projects |

    TwxRay taken to task on Twitter

    by Ryan Graff

    Last week the Knight Lab released a beta version of twXray and received some tough Twitter feedback. We knew, of course, that twxRay was fallible, but it’s another thing to have it out in the world. At any rate, a run down of where it stumbled: You can trick TwxRay with a tweet that takes a common word and applies it in a unique context. A tweet about Tom Cruise may be categorized as travel...

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  • Lab projects |

    Discover what you (or anyone else) tweets about most

    by Ryan Graff

    The Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University launched technology this week that brings transparency and insight to any Twitter feed. twXray (pronounced “twix-ray”) analyzes and categorizes tweets in a user’s Twitter feed to identify the topics they tweet about most – from politics to food to energy to sports. Users simply enter a Twitter handle into twXray.knightlabprojects.com and the site retrieves the most recent few hundred tweets, analyzes them, and produces a chart about...

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