[Air-L] Announcing 140Kit: Presenting 140Kit An Open, Extensible Research Platform for Twitter

Alex Leavitt alexleavitt at gmail.com
Thu Jul 1 10:17:41 PDT 2010


Hello fellow AoIR-ers,

I'm happy to announce the release of *140Kit*: a simple, free-to-use, open
research platform for pulling data from Twitter, built by some awesome
members of the Web Ecology Project (known previously for studies of the
Iranian election on Twitter, the Twitter reactions to Michael Jackson's
death, and a recent initial examination of ChatRoulette). Our release
follows.

*Presenting 140Kit
An Open, Extensible Research Platform for Twitter
by Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, Max Darham, and Max Nanis*

*http://140kit.com/* <http://140kit.com/>

Hello world. It’s been awhile since the Web Ecology community last made a
peep on the web. Some had been speculating that we had simply up and
disappeared, but reports of our demise were greatly exaggerated, as they
say.

In any case, thanks to the completely amazing work of our affiliate
researchers at Bennington, we’re glad today to announce the public launch of
140Kit, Web Ecology’s very own free-to-use toolkit for exploring and data
mining Twitter. It’s the final product of the various provisional tools
we’ve used to produce our previous reports on the social phenomena of
Twitter, and of lead researcher Devin Gaffney’s own work on high throughput
humanities.

So what does it do? Notably:

    * It enables complete data pulls for a set of users or terms on Twitter,
with searches running continuously.
    * The ability to download those data pulls in raw form to use for
whatever you please.
    * The ability to stand on the shoulders of giants by mixing and matching
existing data pulls to generate entirely new combinations of data and
analysis.
    * And the ability to instantaneously generate basic visualizations
around the data (term use, inequality of participation, etc).
*
Best of all, we are making this platform open and free to use for all
interested users*. This includes opening up an API for queries of all sorts,
an honest, open, and editable codebase, and plans already in the works to
make the program extensible to allow developers to write their own analytics
for the kit, on whatever sort of metrics in whatever programming language
(stay tuned for details).

So, get in there and play, people. And let us know if you have any
questions: contact at webecologyproject.org

You can find this release at:
http://www.webecologyproject.org/2010/07/presenting-140kit/
Or via this convenient bit.ly: http://bit.ly/b8ZRRo<http://bit.ly/b8ZRRo%29>
Also, be awesome and retweet our Twitter announcement:
http://twitter.com/WebEcology/status/17506734698

We'd love you to forward this out to any colleagues, researchers, friends,
or even media outlets that you feel would be interested!

Thanks for keeping the internet cool,
Alex

---

Alexander Leavitt
Researcher
Convergence Culture Consortium (Comparative Media Studies, MIT)
Microsoft New England Research & Development
http://doalchemy.org
Twitter: @alexleavitt



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