Mining the Social Web

Visualizing Tons of Tweets

There are more interesting ways to visualize Twitter data than we could possibly cover in this short chapter, but that won’t stop us from working through a couple of exercises with some of the more obvious approaches that provide a good foundation. In particular, we’ll look at loading tweet entities into tag clouds and visualizing “connections” among users with graphs.

Visualizing Tweets with Tricked-Out Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are among the most obvious choices for visualizing the extracted entities from tweets. There are a number of interesting tag cloud widgets that you can find on the Web to do all of the hard work, and they all take the same input—essentially, a frequency distribution like the ones we’ve been computing throughout this chapter. But why visualize data with an ordinary tag cloud when you could use a highly customizable Flash-based rotating tag cloud? There just so happens to be a quite popular open source rotating tag cloud called WP-Cumulus that puts on a nice show. All that’s needed to put it to work is to produce the simple input format that it expects and feed that input format to a template containing the standard HTML boilerplate.

Example 5-17 is a trivial adaptation of Example 5-4 that illustrates a routine emitting a simple JSON structure (a list of [term, URL, frequency] tuples) that can be fed into an HTML template for WP-Cumulus. We’ll pass in empty strings for the URL portion of those tuples, but you could use ...