Understanding Twitter JSON

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python

Alex Hanna

Computational Social Scientist

Contents of Twitter JSON

{  "created_at": "Thu Apr 19 14:25:04 +0000 2018",
   "id": 986973961295720449,
   "id_str": "986973961295720449",
   "text": "Writing out the script of my @DataCamp class 
            and I can't help but mentally read it back to myself in 
            @hugobowne's voice.",    
   "retweet_count": 0,
   "favorite_count": 1,
      ...  }

How many retweets, favorites
Language
Reply to which tweet
Reply to which user

Child JSON objects

{
        "user": {
            "id": 661613,
            "name": "Alex Hanna, Data Witch",
            "screen_name": "alexhanna",
            "location": "Toronto, ON",
            ...
         }
}

Places, retweets/quoted tweets, and 140+ tweets

place and coordinate
- contain geolocation
extended_tweet
- tweets over 140 characters
retweeted_status and quoted_status
- contain all tweet information of retweets and quoted tweets

Accessing JSON

import json

tweet_json = open('tweet-example.json', 'r').read()

tweet = json.loads(tweet_json)

tweet['text']

Child tweet JSON

tweet['user']['screen_name']

tweet['user']['name']

tweet['user']['created_at']

Let's practice!

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python