Twitter Data Collection Framework

February 2015

This is the start of a framework for accessing data from Twitter's REST and Streaming APIs. It comes with several example applications that demonstrate how to make use of the framework.

This framework was created by Prof. Ken Anderson of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Installation

To install the framework:

Download the archive.
cd into twitter_framework
bundle install
There is no step 4.

Assumptions

The above installation instructions assume that you have Ruby 2.X.X installed and that you also have Bundler installed and that the bundle command is on your path.

Property Files

Each of the included applications has a required command-line argument -p (short for --props) which takes the name of a file that contains a consumer key and user access token generated by https://dev.twitter.com/. The format of the file is the following:

{
  "consumer_key"    : "<consumer_key_goes_here>",
  "consumer_secret" : "<consumer_secret_goes_here>",
  "token"           : "<access_token_goes_here>",
  "token_secret"    : "<access_token_secret_goes_here>"
}

To get these values, head to https://dev.twitter.com/ and click on the link that says Manage Your Apps.

Have Fun!

You can now try out some of the command-line programs that come with the framework such as get_tweets.rb or find_tweets.rb. Most of these apps behave similarly. Invoke one with the --help flag to get a feel for how they work.

If you have any questions, send them to Prof. Ken Anderson of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.