Trends Project

In this project, you will develop a geographic visualization of Twitter data across the USA. You will need to use dictionaries, lists, and data abstraction techniques to create a modular program. This project uses ideas from Sections 2.1-2.4 of the lecture notes.

The map displayed above depicts how the people in different states feel about Texas. This image is generated by:

Collecting public Twitter posts (tweets) that have been tagged with geographic locations and filtering for those that contain the "texas" query term,
Assigning a sentiment (positive or negative) to each tweet, based on all of the words it contains,
Aggregating tweets by the state with the closest geographic center, and finally
Coloring each state according to the aggregate sentiment of its tweets. Red means positive sentiment; blue means negative.
The details of how to conduct each of these steps is contained within the project description. By the end of this project, you will be able to map the sentiment of any word or phrase. There are two alternative zip archives related to this project: