Collect Twitter content for each Senator and Member of Congress

[gati]

This issue is the first step for using social media sentiment to assess the popular support (or lack thereof) for a given Member of Congress and Senator, and subsequently testing whether that support score is a useful signal in assessing the vulnerability of their seat.

[gati]

Here are lists to start from: https://twitter.com/gov/lists/us-senate/members?lang=en https://twitter.com/gov/lists/us-house/members?lang=en

[tejasdessai]

@gati how do I know if anyone else is attempting this? Sorry, just learning the ropes of git

[gati]

@tejasdessai no need to apologize! Github issues can be "assigned" to people, but I think you have to be a member of the Data for Democracy organization for me to assign the issue to you, or for you to assign it to yourself (that way everyone will know you're working on it). I added you to the D4D organization, but I think you have to accept the invite -- if that didn't make its way into your inbox, just let me know, I can resend.

Thanks again for your help with this project!

[gati]

@tejasdessai Just assigned this to you. The idea, at least at first, is to get a sense of "who is tweeting about " <-- once we have a list of Twitter users (and their metadata -- number of followers, etc) who have tweeted to the candidates, we can start to build out a larger dataset. What do you think?

[EmVitz]

I'd be interested in helping with this. I've just joined Data for Democracy so am pretty new to all of this, so pointers on how I can be useful are always appreciated. @tejasdessai is there anything specific I could do to be of use?

@gati the links you've put up to the twitter lists don't seem to work.

[gati]

@EmVitz Indeed they do not. :) Thanks for the heads up. Here are alternates!

Congress: https://twitter.com/verified/lists/us-congress/members?lang=en Just Senate: http://www.socialseer.com/resources/us-senator-twitter-accounts/ US Reps: https://twitter.com/cspan/lists/u-s-representatives/members?lang=en

[gati]

Also @tejasdessai and @EmVitz I think the first dataset that would be super valuable is a list of as many users as possible who have mentioned a member of Congress in the past 12 months. So just a simple dataset of like:

user_id	screen_name	mentioned_member
123456	john_doe	SpeakerRyan

Would be a great starting point. You may want to coordinate a bit on Slack to make sure you don't inadvertently overlap work. But whoever can get to it first, go for it! :)

Thanks to you both for taking a look at this!

[ben-cunningham]

Hey @gati, I'm interested in joining the project, do you have any idea where to start? In the meantime I'll scrape the dataset you mentioned above of users who mentioned US members of congress :)