The Data

I decided to monitor all geolocalized tweets with my home city (Caracas) as origin over a period of five days, two days before the elections, the election day, and two days after it.

To fetch the data, I used the Twython library since I've worked with it before. Therefore, it should be easy to setup a quick script to fetch the data and save it in a text file.

Once the API and OAUTH keys are correctly following Twython's documentation, the next step is to fetch the data originating in certain location, passing it as a parameter to the streaming API. Twitter uses a set of bounding boxes to track the location of a tweet and only geolocated Tweets falling within the requested bounding boxes will be included.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

import json, os
from twython import TwythonStreamer

caracas_location = "-67.017225,10.419554,-66.778716,10.52006"

class MyStreamer(TwythonStreamer):
    def on_success(self, data):
        if data['coordinates'] is not None:
            with open('tweets.txt', 'a') as f:
                f.write(json.dumps(data))
                f.write('\n')

    def on_error(self, status_code, data):
        with open('errors.txt', 'a') as f:
            f.write('error: {0}: {1}'.format(status_code, data))



stream = MyStreamer(os.environ['APP_KEY'], os.environ['APP_SECRET'],
                        os.environ['OAUTH_TOKEN'], os.environ['OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET'])

stream.statuses.filter(locations=caracas_location)

Since I just wanted to fetch geolocalized tweets, I checked for the existance of the coordinates entity in the …