For the third blog post on this topic I wanted to use Python to generate different pieces of art without relying entirely on the random function. I decided to use the tweepy library, mainly because I had already used it to post content to Twitter but had never investigated how it could be used to read information back from Twitter.
It didn’t take long to find out how to read the latest 10 tweets from my own timeline using Python. Then I split the individual words into a list and sorted them into alphabetical order (for no real reason at the moment, but frequency analysis will follow!). Then I used the write method from the Turtle graphics library to place each word at a random location on the screen. This was my first attempt:
A bit tricky to read the words I thought. And I’d accidentally forgotten to penup before moving the turtle. However this accidental vector spider web became part of the artwork (because when I removed it, it looked quite boring).
A little while later I was able to change the font size at random (I changed the font to palatino after experimenting with a few others) and changing the pencolor in the same way as previous Python art programs changed the text colour too.
I had a lot of text to display, even just from 10 tweets, so I thought of ways to reduce the amount. I wrote a little Python subroutine that removed hashtags, mentions and URLs (as well as any other non ASCII text) and that was enough!
The video below shows the program in action. I decided to make a video this time because you can make out the individual words much more clearly at the beginning of the drawing than at the end!
As before the code is now on github (with my tweepy details removed for security). I’ve left in a commented out section of code that allows you to run a search for a keyword, hashtag or phrase instead of taking the latest timeline so you can experiment.
Any comments or improvements would be much appreciated!
