Mar 23, 2010
We Read, We Tweet: Visualizing the New York Times Through Twitter
We Read, We Tweet from Justin Blinder on Vimeo.
“We Read, We Tweet” geographically visualizes Tweets about New York Times articles. Each line connects the location of a tweet to the contextual location of the article it references. The lines are generated based on the sequence in which the tweets occurred. The result is a visualization of the global interest of specific New York Times articles through reader’s Tweets. The video only shows a small portion of tweets aggregated from each article, some of which contain of corresponding Tweets.
The articles and tweets are constantly being aggregated and stored in a database, making use of the Twitter, Backtweets, Google Maps, and New York Times Articles API. Every 10 minutes, the Backtweets API is queried to find the most recent New York Times articles that have been tweeted about. For each article found, the New York Times Articles API is queried and if a contextual location is found, that location is then geocoded using the Google Maps API. Every tweet that mentions this article is also geocoded using the Google Maps API, and both the article and tweets are stored in a database. The Backtweets API was quite awesome with parsing out shortened URLs. The visualization itself was written in Java / Processing.
I’m currently rewriting parts of the app, mainly the interface components, the camera, and some performance issues. I’m hoping to release on online interactive version soon.
[...] Justin Blinder’s visualization of tweets was written in Processing and built with the Times Article Search API, the Twitter API, the [...]
"We Read, We Tweet" http://bit.ly/crvcWZ was just featured on the #NYTimes! http://bit.ly/9eNwTF #processing
Checking out @justinblinder's "We Read, We Tweet: Visualizing the New York Times Through Twitter" http://bit.ly/crvcWZ
Tricky! RT @kylecameron – @justinblinder's "We Read, We Tweet: Visualizing the New York Times Through Twitter" http://bit.ly/crvcWZ
RT @kylecameron Checking out @justinblinder's "We Read, We Tweet: Visualizing the New York Times Through Twitter" http://bit.ly/crvcWZ
[...] up some interesting visualizations using Twitter and the New York Times API in a project called We Read, We Tweet. As Justin explains: We Read, We Tweet geographically visualizes Tweets about New York Times [...]