The project I created analyzed twitter sentiments for students from around the Oakland University campus.
I was inspired to create this project because of the challenge it posed to me. Before walking into Grizzhacks, I was unfamiliar with the google cloud offerings, the Twitter API and wrappers, and I only had minimal experience with flask. I learned an incredible amount about all of these technologies even if I ended up coming up a little short of my goal. In the end I ended up creating a web platform that can be locally run. It processes twitter data from the area around Oakland University and returns insight about the sentiments of those tweets. For example, my locally run website is able to determine the average sentiment and returns a different colored background to the website depending on that sentiment. If the sentiment is negative, a more red background is displayed. If the sentiment is positive, a more green background is displayed. In addition to the color of the display, most specific positive and negative tweets are returned. In, my opinion, the negative tweets were the most enjoyable. While coding in the early morning, my favorite tweet with a negative sentiment was returned which was, " Sometimes I think the worst form of death would be to require someone to lick the dirty toilet plunger from a @Starbucks bathroom".
I was able to create this project by utilizing python, flask, the twitter API, a twitter API wrapper, and the google cloud language processing tool. Essentially, I retrieved tweets from around Oakland University, fed them to the google cloud language processing tool, and returned that even more refined output to a website. I ran into a ton of difficulties while doing this. The most major one was the fact that I was not able to run my website non locally. Most of the other hurdles that I ran into, I was typically able to overcome by using documentation that I found online. Though that sounds easy on paper, I spent a ton of time scrounging the interned looking for any bit of help. I probably ended up spending way more time googling, that actually coding.
In the end, I'm incredibly proud of what I accomplished. Even though I fell a little short of what I was hoping to achieve, I still created a pretty impressive platform by myself. I really hope to take away the skills I refined and developed these past 24 hours and apply them to future projects. ......
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