15 March 2012 4 Comments

Visualizing Bigfoot of the United States

A fun little Viz I did about Bigfoot sightings.

Basically, I harvested all the sighting info off of The Bigfoot Field Research Organization site with Python and the Scrapemark module – inserted it into a local SQL Server database – cleaned it up and threw up a pretty looking Viz using Tableau Public.

Visualizing Squatch of the Nation!

I’m pretty happy with it – its quite interactive and hopefully someone finds it fun or interesting.

13 March 2012 38 Comments

Harvesting Twitter Search Results for Analysis using Python & SQL Server

Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s Data. Realtime, Social, Contextual Data. But, if you want to do any real trending, data mining, post-processing, or even simple analysis on it – you really need to be making a historical record of what you’re looking for and store it in a usable way. I will show you how to create SQL Server tables and use a simple Python script to pull out tweets and save them for future analysis.