Ever felt your twitter newsfeed has too much going on that you don’t have time to read them all, let alone digest? I certainly do, even though I only follow like 20 people. Whenever I open the app, I was “bombarded” by all the new tweets and, even after scrolling through all of them (as I feel obligated to), I don’t feel I have actually taken any new information in. How nice would it be if someone handpicked and highlighted all the useful information for us?
This week I started taking this Coursera class called Introduction to Data Science taught by Bill Howe from University of Washington. Although there has only been one lesson so far, my experience has been quite positive particularly due to the interesting programing assignment, which is to use twitter’s live stream data to analyze tweet sentiment. If you are interested and want to try yourself, you can read the very helpful instruction here and clone the git here (I believe you can access it without signing up for the class, but the course is free anyway).
This weekend I decided to learn more about twitter and its handy API. My subject of the analysis is Artsy, a fine-art website that provides a pandora-like service. The subjects I was curious to find out are where their followers are from, what their twitter activities are like, what other interests they have, and, specifically, what kind of stereotypes clusters they fall into because, you know, it’s important and I didn’t have anything better to do.