Blog post about this at http://gettinggeneticsdone.blogspot.com/2013/05/automated-analysis-tweets-bioinformatics-twitterchive.html.
twitterchive.sh: Script to search and save results from a Twitter search.
Script uses sferki's t command line client to search twitter for keywords stored in the arr variable inside the script.
Must first install the t gem and authenticate with OAuth (see the t readme).
Twitter enforces some API limits to how many tweets you can search for in one query, and how many queries you can execute in a given period.
I'm not sure what these limitations are, but I've hit them a few times. To be safe, I would limit the number of queries to ~5, $n to ~200, and run no more than a couple times per hour.
You can set this up in a cron job using something like:
# Run at the top of the hour every four hours.
00 00,04,08,12,16,20 * * * export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH && cd /path/to/twitterchive && ./twitterchive.sh > /home/user/logs/cronlog.txt 2>&1
analysis/twitterchive.r: R stats script that contains a function to read in and parse the fixed width text files above, and produce some plots:
- Number of tweets per day for the last n days
- Frequency of tweets by hour of the day
- Barplot of the most frequently used hashtags within a query
- Barplot of the most prolific tweeters
- The ubiquitous wordcloud