We are looking for student researchers to assist in the development of a system to process and visualize the social media activity of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We’ve already collected over 25 million tweets, and we’re adding anywhere from 300,000-1 million new tweets each day. The system we are developing (an information flow atlas) will be able to process the social media data in real-time and create interactive visualizations such as information flow or retweet maps.
Our data collection and processing system runs on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) using a combination of python, unix shell scripts, mongoDB (a NoSQL database), Hadoop (MapReduce clusters), and R. We’re adding more data and data sources every day. Students do not need prior familiarity with all of these technologies — this is an opportunity to learn! Ugrad researchers would help us write code to collect, process, explore, verify, and visualize the data. There’s room for coding on both the server side and the client side.
Our lab consists of one faculty member from the iSchool and three PhD students from the iSchool and the Department of Geography. We work hard, value everyone’s contribution, and have a lot of fun while doing it.
Credit through the Informatics program is available.
Thanks,
Shawn
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Shawn Walker
Doctoral Candidate
The Information School
University of Washington
University of Washington
SoMe Lab – Social Media Lab @ UW — http://somelab.net/