Slides from a 2-hour workshop at Data Day Texas 2014 on how to mine social web APIs. This workshop specifically focused on extracting insight from Twitter data and was partitioned into two hour long segments. The first segment focused on familiarity with Twitter's API, while the latter segment focused on using pandas to extract insight from tweets from the firehose via the Streaming API.

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Mining Social Web APIs
with IPython Notebook
Matthew A. Russell - @ptwobrussell - http://MiningTheSocialWeb.com
Data Day Texas - 11 January 2014

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Intro

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Hello, My Name Is ... Matthew
Background in Computer Science
Data mining & machine learning
CTO @ Digital Reasoning Systems
Data mining; machine learning
Author @ O'Reilly Media
5 published books on technology
Principal @ Zaffra
Selective boutique consulting

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Transforming Curiosity Into Insight
An open source software (OSS) project
http://bit.ly/MiningTheSocialWeb2E
A book
http://bit.ly/135dHfs
Accessible to (virtually) everyone
Virtual machine with turn-key coding
templates for data science experiments
Think of the book as "premium" support for the
OSS project

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The Social Web Is All the Rage
World population: ~7B people
Facebook: 1.15B users
Twitter: 500M users
Google+ 343M users
LinkedIn: 238M users
~200M+ blogs (conservative estimate)

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Overview
Intro (5 mins)
Module 1 - Virtual Machine & IPython Notebook Overview (10 mins)
Module 2 - Twitter Intro/Overview (45 mins)
Module 3 - Twitter Firehose Analysis with pandas (45 mins)
Module 4 - Overview of other MTSW IPython Notebooks (5 mins)
Wrap Up/Final Q&A (10 mins)

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Workshop Objective
To send you away as a social web hacker
Hands-on experience hacking on Twitter data
Empowered to walk away ready for on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.
Broad working knowledge popular social web APIs
To have fun and learn a few things

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Just a Few More Things
This workshop is...
An adaptation of Chapters 1+9 from Mining the Social Web, 2nd Edition
More of a guided hacking session where you follow along (vs a lecture)
Designed to be very hands-on, not a lecture
I'm available 24/7 this week (and beyond) to help you be successful

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Assumptions
At some point in your life, you have
Programmed with Python
Worked with JSON
Made requests and processed responses to/from web servers
Or you want to learn to do these things now...
And you're a quick learner

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Module 1: Virtual Machine Setup

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Why do you need a VM?
To save time
Because installation and configuration management is harder than it first
appears
So that you can focus on the task at hand instead
So that I can support you regardless of your hardware and operating
system

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But I can do all of that myself...
True...
If you would rather troubleshoot unexpected installation/configuration issues
instead of immediately focusing on the real task at hand
At least give it a shot before resorting to your own devices so that you
don't have to install specific versions of ~40 Python packages
Including scientific computing tools that require underlying C/C++ code to
be compiled
Which requires specific versions of developer libraries to be installed
You get the idea...

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The Virtual Machine Experience
Vagrant
A nice abstraction around virtual machine providers
One ring to rule them all
Virtualbox, VMWare, AWS, ...
IPython Notebook
The easiest way to program with Python
A better REPL (interpreter)
Great for hacking

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What happens when you vagrant up?
Vagrant follows the instructions in your Vagrantfile
Starts up a Virtualbox instance
Uses Chef to provision it
Installs OS patches/updates
Installs MTSW software dependencies
Starts IPython Notebook server on port 8888

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Why Should I Use IPython Notebook?
Because it's great for hacking
And hacking is usually the first step
Because it's great for collaboration
Sharing/publishing results is trivial
Because the UX is as easy as working in a notepad
Think of it as "executable paper"

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VM Quick Start Instructions
Go to http://MiningTheSocialWeb.com/quick-start/
Follow the instructions
And watch the screencasts!
Basically:
Install Virtualbox & Vagrant
Run "vagrant up" in a terminal to start a guest VM
Then, go to http://localhost:8888 on your host machine's web browser

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What Could Be Easier?
A hosted version of the VM!
But only for a few hours during this workshop
Because it costs money to run these servers
Go to http://bit.ly/mtsw-ddtx14 and pick a machine
Please do not share the URLs outside of this workshop!
With a cherry on top...

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A Hosted Virtual Machine
Is it free?
Perhaps...
...Sign-up for the AWS free tier at http://aws.amazon.com/free/
But not right now. Do it later
See this blog post for some inspiration on how to easily build your own
AMI from Vagrant boxes
http://wp.me/p3QiJd-3T

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One More Thing
There's a new alpha product from O'Reilly Media that hosts IPython
Notebooks and other software to enhance reading experiences
I can share out "invites" with any interested volunteers

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Module 2: Twitter Intro/Overview

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Objectives
Be able to identify Twitter primitives
Understand tweet metadata and how to use it
Learn how to extract entities such as user mentions, hashtags, and URLs
Apply techniques for performing frequency analysis with Python
Be able to plot histograms of Twitter data with IPython Notebook
Learn about a Twitter cookbook that you can easily adapt

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Twitter Primitives
Accounts Types: "Anything"
"Following" Relationships
Favorites
Retweets
Replies
(Almost) No Privacy Controls

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API Requests
RESTful requests
Everything is a "resource"
You GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE resources
Standard HTTP "verbs"
Example: GET https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?
screen_name=SocialWebMining
Streaming API filters
JSON responses
Cursors (not quite pagination)

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Twitter is an Interest Graph
Johnny
Araya
Roberto
Mercedes
Rodolfo
Hernández
Ana
Jorge
Nina

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What's in a Tweet?
140 Characters ...
... Plus ~5KB of metadata!
Authorship
Time & location
Tweet "entities"
Replying, retweeting, favoriting, etc.

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What are Tweet Entities?
Essentially, the "easy to get at" data in the 140 characters
@usermentions
#hashtags
URLs
multiple variations
(financial) symbols
stock tickers
media

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Data Mining Is Often Just...
Counting
Comparing
Filtering
Ranking

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Histograms
A chart that is handy for frequency analysis
They look like bar charts...except they're not bar charts
Each value on the x-axis is a range (or "bin") of values
Not categorical data
Each value on the y-axis is the combined frequency of values in each range

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Example: Histogram of Retweets

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Social Media Analysis Framework
A memorable four step process to guide data science experiments:
Aspire
To test a hypothesis (answer a question)
Acquire
Get the data
Analyze
Count things
Summarize
Plot the results

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Exercises
Review Python idioms in the "Appendix C (Python Tips & Tricks)" notebook
Follow the setup instructions in the "Chapter 1 (Mining Twitter)" notebook
Fill in Example 1-1 with credentials and begin work
See https://vimeo.com/79220146 for a helpful video
Execute each example sequentially
Customize queries, explore tweet metadata, count tweet entities, etc.
Explore the "Chapter 9 (Twitter Cookbook)" notebook
In particular, check out Example 9-8 (Twitter's Streaming API)

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Module 3: Twitter Firehose
Analysis with pandas

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Objectives
To understand how to capture data from Twitter's firehose
A understand basic pandas usage for tweets
To work through a data science experiment with a systematic 4-step
process

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Social Media Analysis Framework
Remember:
Aspire
Acquire
Analyze
Summarize

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Understanding the Reaction Amazon Prime Air
Open up the notebook entitled __Understanding the Reaction to Amazon Prime
Air.ipynb and follow along
Or, visit http://bit.ly/mtsw-amazon-prime-air and follow along if you're just joining us

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Module 4: Overview of other
MTSW IPython Notebooks

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Mining the Social Web ToC
Chapter 1 - Mining Twitter
Chapter 2 - Mining Facebook
Chapter 3 - Mining LinkedIn
Chapter 4 - Mining Google+
Chapter 5 - Mining Web Pages
Chapter 6 - Mining Mailboxes
Chapter 7 - Mining GitHub
Chapter 8 - Mining the Semantically Marked-Up Web
Chapter 9 - Twitter Cookbook

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A Recommendation
Bookmark http://nbviewer.ipython.org
Take note of Mining the Social Web under "Books"
Notice lots of other terrific notebooks, too

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Wrap Up / Final Q&A

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Helpful Links & Free Stuff
http://MiningTheSocialWeb.com
Mining the Social Web 2E Chapter 1 (Chimera)
http://bit.ly/13XgNWR
Source Code (GitHub)
http://bit.ly/MiningTheSocialWeb2E
http://bit.ly/1fVf5ej (numbered examples)
Screencasts (Vimeo)
http://bit.ly/mtsw2e-screencasts