Tsarnaev trial through tweets

This is my attempt to curate the tweets of the many journalists live-tweeting the Tsarnaev trial. After taking quite a while to collect all the data, I tried some pretty complicated things to try to group them about event chronologically. Ultimately the grouping didn’t ever work that well, and it still wasn’t producing a good summary. After trying a lot of different things, I found it was best to simply highlight tweets that had many more retweets than usual for that user, so I stuck with that approach to automatically choose which of the >10k of Tsarnaev trial-related tweets to highlight from these users.

I have had been having a bit of trouble debugging the second part of the timeline feature, but for now at least here is the semi-automatic livetweet summary of the Tsarnaev trial:

http://austinhess.github.io/twitter_project/

1 thought on “Tsarnaev trial through tweets

  1. Simple and neat idea for chronologically constructing a narrative using curated tweets. Really liked it. It would be interesting to see how the tweets with low retweet number constitute a narrative and how is it different from what you are presenting.

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