Query Text Table

We’ll be using the query_text table functionality of the twitter_database. See twitter_database documentation for details. We begin by creating the query_text table containing our search queries.

query.text.dataframe <- data.frame(
  query_text = c(
    "#Boston",
    "#GuatemalaCity",
    "#CiudaddeGuatemala",
    "#CiudadGuatemala"
  ),
  location = c(
    "Boston",
    "Guatemala City",
    "Guatemala City",
    "Guatemala City"
  ),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

Initialize database

We need to set a working directory to store the database and analysis products. Once we set the directory, we’ll change into it and initialize the location database with our query.text.dataframe. Note that this vignette does not use the query_users table, but it could. See the US Politics vignette and the twitter_database documentation for examples on how to include and use a query_users table.

dir.create("~/twitter_locations",showWarnings=FALSE)
setwd("~/twitter_locations")
con <- twitter_database(
  "locations.sqlite",
  query.text.df = query.text.dataframe
)

Authenticate to Twitter API

We’ll use the INFORM-Tutorial Twitter Application. Alternatively, you can supply your own application credentials using the authorize_app function.

You will need a Twitter Account to continue! If you don’t have one, you can easily create one on the Twitter website. If you do not have a Twitter account and do not wish to make one, this package will be of very limited use to you.

I recommend logging onto Twitter in your Browser before running this line. Either way, be careful not to hit immediately after running it, for example by copying and pasting the whole line with the ‘newline’ character into an R console.

auth.vector <- authorize_IT()

Run this line, log into Twitter, and get the authentication PIN. If you get an error message from Twitter saying the URL is expired, the probable cause is that you hit before entering the PIN, possibly when you copied and pasted the command.

It is important to name the result auth.vector as shown above, as the functions in the twinfoR package look for this global variable. If you give this result a different name, you must manually supply it to the Twitter API methods. Optionally, save this vector in order to skip the authentication process in the future.

save(auth.vector,file="auth_vector.RData")