{"id":5904,"date":"2015-11-23T08:01:17","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T07:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5904"},"modified":"2015-11-23T09:07:03","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T08:07:03","slug":"twitter-wordcloud-using-r","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5904","title":{"rendered":"Twitter wordcloud using R"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent trend on Facebook is to create a wordcloud of all of your posts using an external service<\/a>. I chose not to use it because I tend to use Facebook for personal interactions among close friends and I didn’t want to send all of my data to another external company.<\/p>\n

Twitter is a different matter, however! All of the data is open and it’s very easy to write a computer program to generate Twitter world clouds without the need for an external service.<\/p>\n

I wrote a simple script in R<\/a> that generates a wordcloud from the most recent 3200 tweets and outputs the top 200 words (get the code on github<\/a>). The script removes many of the uninteresting words such as the, of, and that would otherwise dominate the cloud. These stopwords<\/a> come from the Top100Words list of the R package qdap<\/a>\u00a0but I also added a few more such as ‘just’ and ‘me’ that I seem to use a lot.<\/p>\n

This is the current wordcloud for my twitter account, walkingrandomly<\/a>. Click on the image to see a bigger version. My main interests are very clear – Python programming, research software, data and anything that’s new!<\/p>\n

\"Mike\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once I had seen my wordcloud, I wondered how things would look for other twitter users who I pay a lot of attention to. This is how it looks for Manchester University’s Nick Higham<\/a>. Clearly he’s big on SIAM, Manchester, and Matrix Analysis!<\/p>\n

\"nhigham\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I then looked at my manager at Sheffield University, Neil Lawrence<\/a>. Neil finds data and the city of Sheffield very important and also writes about workshops, science, blog posts and machine learning a lot.<\/p>\n

\"lawrennd\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The R code that generated these wordclouds is available on github but it won’t work out of the box. You’ll need to register with twitter for app development<\/a> (It’s free and fairly straightforward) and get various access keys before you can use the code.<\/p>\n