It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost […]
Category Archives: twitter
Avec le temps
Dramatic news about Twitter, like we’ve seen in the past week, always drives a big influx of people to Mastodon. Mastodon, part of a larger decentralized federation of communities called the fediverse, is my social medium of choice. On a superficial level, Mastodon is very Twitter-like. The culture though, is very different. New arrivals to […]
Also posted in mastodon
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A return to Twarc
Our library started archiving tweets about our college in 2015. At first, our archive ran an archiving tool called Twarc, on SDF. SDF is a hobbyist programming community; it’s a dynamic place, full of enthusiastic tinkerers and notoriously unreliable infrastructure. The archive trundled along that way until 2017, when I switched it over to TCAT, […]
Also posted in archives, pythonanywhere, tcat, twarc
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Sentiment analysis
For almost five years now, our library has been archiving tweets about our college. I’ve posted about that here and here. Until recently, I didn’t really have an agenda for this data, other than preserving it. Last week that changed. At our college’s Data Faculty Interest Group, I mentioned the tweet archive as a potentially […]
Also posted in archives, python, sentiment analysis
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What I learned from 52,080 tweets
A few weeks ago, over the course of 15 days, I gathered 52,080 tweets about learning to code. I did this with TCAT, the open source tool that our library uses for Twitter archiving. I gathered all tweets that matched any of three popular learn to code hashtags: #codenewbie, #learntocode and #100daysofcode. What I learned […]
Making bots on Mastodon
I made a Mastodon bot this past weekend. It’s called Why, and it tries to answer the perennial question “Why?” with responses from public domain texts from Project Gutenberg. I built this for Mastodon, rather for Twitter, for a couple of reasons: I was curious about the Mastodon API and the tools that are available […]
Teaching librarians to build Twitter bots
Robin Davis (@robincamille) and I are running a Twitter bot-making workshop next week at ALA Annual in New Orleans. We’ve run this workshop a couple of times before, and it’s always been a positive experience. It’s a great way to introduce people to Python while building something fun. Right now, I’m in the midst of […]
Archiving with TCAT
For quite some time now, our library has been archiving tweets about our college using twarc. This has been fine, so I hadn’t really dug any deeper into the world of archiving bots until earlier this week when my colleague Shawna Brandle approached me about using TCAT, the Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset. TCAT has […]
DIY Twitter analytics
Our library uses Twitter (@kbcclibrary) to communicate with our students and faculty. Along with our tweeting, we rely on metrics to keep tabs on our Twitter presence. We get these metrics exclusively from free tools: the native Twitter Analytics page, but also third party analytics sites like Tweetstats and the free version of (the unfortunately […]
Also posted in visualization
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Archiving tweets about Kingsborough
Last year, I heard about a python program called Twarc, which was developed by Ed Summers, a software developer at the University of Maryland, to capture and archive tweets. Back in August, Ed demonstrated the effectiveness of this tool by capturing over 13 million tweets about events in Ferguson, MO as they unfolded over the […]
