Hash-tagged

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  Example Data Graph #1

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  Example Data Graph #2

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  Example of Data Graph #3

Inspiration

When brainstorming a problem to solve with our project, we first thought about personal problems that we had, and later about the problems of those close to us. As it turns out, one of our team member's parents worked as a sociology professor. From there we were inspired to produce something that could make the lives of social analysists easier. In particular, with the rise of social media, we especially wanted to target the expression of people's opinions online via Twitter.

What it does

Our program Hash-tagged is a multi-stepped code that compiles the most recent 2000~ tweets of any chosen hashtag. From there, the program identifies the words that appear the most often throughout the tweets (minus unnecessary determiner words such as "a, an, like"). In the end, the data is presented in an easily understandable graph and table format for analysts to use.

How we built it

Firstly, we were able to locate an extension online that helped us gather the tweets of specific hashtags into a spreadsheet. From there, we used Python to categorize, sort, and delete certain words that were found in the code, and automatically wrote our data to another spreadsheet. Using the language R, we compiled the data to graphs and tables.

Challenges we ran into

With the nature of Python and R being two different languages, we realized that many times, the format that Python wrote onto a spreadsheet was incompatible with the format that R read from a spreadsheet. Because of this, we were constantly adapting and accommodating our code so that our finish product was polished.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

At the end of the day, we're most proud of producing a system that is practical and fully functioning. As written down below, we believe that there are steps ahead for Hash-tagged in terms of user experience, but our current system can be used, as well.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to connect various concepts and languages together to create one project. Before Hash-tagged, we mainly used each language in isolation, however, with this project we were able to expand our skillsets to combine them for one purpose.

What's next for Hash-tagged

We hope to extend Hash-tagged to be even more efficient for users. As of right now, we have all of the intermediate steps working (compiling tweets, sorting words, creating graphs), but want to take it one step further and allow it all to run with the simple input of a hashtag. This would require connecting all of the above systems together.

Built With

• excel
• python
• r