A Step-by-step Guide to Visualising Tweets

In response to psychemedia's request, I've put up a commented version of the code used to generate Wordles and Google Timelines.

The very rough and ready process was along the lines of:

1. Run the Perl script to output Tweets into CSV format. These will be ordered in forwards chronological order. The script also generates a count for the number of tweets in each 10 minute time slot, to give some idea of activity over the course of time.


2. Import the CSV into a fresh Google docs spreadsheet.


3. I found it handy to duplicate this sheet, to play with subsets of the data e.g. just tweets for certain days.


4. For the Wordles, I simply selected the relevant column (i.e. usernames, or tweet texts), and pasted into a decent text editor. I removed half the #ukgc09 tags for tweet texts, to stop it overpowering the rest. Then I just headed over to http://www.wordle.net/create, pasted the text, and played with formatting until I got something I like the look of.


5. For the Google Timeline, I created a version of the sheet with 4 columns: tweet date/time (to become the X axis), number of tweets for this 10-minute time band (for Y axis = activity), tweet author and tweet content (for the notations). Then it was just a case of opening the "Insert gadget" menu, choosing the "Interactive Time Series Chart" gadget, and setting the Range to include all the data in these columns.
   
   I found it easiest to limit tweets to 3 days (otherwise the amount of notations causes the browser to get very slow), and to move the gadget to a separate sheet.
   
   Then I published the whole document as a web page (see the "Share" menu in the top right of the spreadsheet - you need to publish the data for the chart to work).
   

And that's it. As yet, I haven't found a way to publish just the gadget - Google have code to embed it in a page, but this doesn't seem to work.

I'm pretty sure there's a whole lot more you could do - I was just intrigued as to how activity varied through the weekend. (Perhaps it's good that the wifi on the day was down - I'm not sure how well that Time Series gadget scales...) The Wordles also seem quite a nice way to remember the day. Perhaps it might be possible to generate a similar, animated version to view word/author proliferation throughout a day as well?

Anyway, if you have any questions, leave a comment or get in touch via Twitter.