Basic Querying
As I had never used the Twitter4J library before I searched for an online tutorial to help. As I was impressed with the ‘Just Landed’ visualisation, I used a tutorial created by the same developer Jer Thorp. On his site I found a piece of code that simply searched for a key word and would display the last one hundred people that had tweeted it.
Twitter myTwitter;
void setup() {
myTwitter = new Twitter("yourTwitterUserName", "yourTwitterPassword");
try {
Query query = new Query("sandwich");
query.setRpp(100);
QueryResult result = myTwitter.search(query);
ArrayList tweets = (ArrayList) result.getTweets();
for (int i = 0; i < tweets.size(); i++) {
Tweet t = (Tweet) tweets.get(i);
String user = t.getFromUser();
String msg = t.getText();
Date d = t.getCreatedAt();
println("Tweet by " + user + " at " + d + ": " + msg);
};
}
catch (TwitterException te) {
println("Couldn't connect: " + te);
};
};
void draw() {
};
This then printed on the console the last hundred people that tweeted the word ‘sandwich’. To make my Artefact work I needed to adapt this to search for two parameters at once, i.e. both a location on the globe and a key word.