What does Barack Obama tweet about most?

Want to find out the favourite topics (as measured by their preferred hashtags) for any Twitter user? It's easy to do, thanks to this R language program by Mark T Patterson. Here are the top 20 results for Barack Obama, based on his most recent 3200 tweets (notice that #immigration has jumped to #2 on the list since Mark ran his analysis yesterday).

If you'd like to do the sama analysis on a different twitter user, you'll need to run the script in R, with the twitteR package installed (use install.packages("twitteR") ). You'll also need to register for a Twitter developer account and register a new Twitter app — it's quick and easy to do, and this page has useful information if you're not sure. I had to modify the first few lines of Mike's script as follows, substituting the consumer key and consumer secret provided by Twitter after registering my app.

cred <- getTwitterOAuth("my_consumer_key","my_consumer_secret")
registerTwitterOAuth(cred)
tw = userTimeline("BarackObama", n = 3200)

Tip: don't forget to save("cred",file="twitter-cred.Rd") so you can load("~/R/twitter-cred.Rd") for use in a future script that uses twitterR. To run the script for a different user, change "BarackObama" in the third line of the script above to any other vald Twitter username. Here's mine! This version of the script makes the user name a variable and modifies the plot title accordingly.

Decisions and R: Using R to find Obama's most frequent twitter hashtags

Comments

[James]

Where is the function getTwitterOAuth found?

[David Smith]

@James, it's part of the twitteR package. Here's its documentation.