Synthesis: Visualizing Retweets with Protovis

A turn-key example script that synthesizes much of the content from this chapter and adds a visualization is how we’ll wrap up this chapter. In addition to spitting some useful information out to the console, it accepts a search term as a command line parameter, fetches, parses, and pops up your web browser to visualize the data as an interactive HTML5-based graph. It is available through the official code repository for this book at http://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web/blob/master/python_code/introduction__retweet_visualization.py. You are highly encouraged to try it out. We’ll revisit Protovis, the underlying visualization toolkit for this example, in several chapters later in the book. Figure 1-4 illustrates Protovis output from this script. The boilerplate in the sample script is just the beginning—much more can be done!