Introduction
In this chapter, we are going to dive into the world of social media analysis through the use of RESTful web service APIs. Twitter is a microblogging social network whose stream is invaluable for data mining, particularly text mining, and they have an excellent API that we will learn how to interact with via Python. We will use the API to fetch Twitter social connections and collect and store JSON data using both traditional file storage and the popular NoSQL database, MongoDB. Our analysis will attempt to ascertain the geographic location of connections and produce visualization from the data.
Throughout the chapter, you should begin to notice patterns about how APIs are designed and their intended use. Interaction with APIs is an extremely important data science topic, and having a solid understanding of them will unlock a whole new world of data upon which you can perform a myriad of analyses.
API stands for Application Programming Interface, and in traditional computer science...