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March, 2014

  1. Sentiment Analysis made simple

    March 27, 2014 by Robin Englebright

    A while back I enrolled on a MOOC module on Data Analytics, and one of the first assignments was to perform a sentiment analysis on twitter. This involved getting a developer API key from Twitter, then writing a python script to suck tweets from the mighty twitter firehose. Analysis involved comparison against a sentiment sorted dictionary of terms.

    Whilst those skills are obviously useful, for those not willing to learn Python there’s a cracking tool available to analyse tweets with a hashtag:

    http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/tweet_viz/tweet_app/
    I found out about it in a tweet from Randy Olsen, who ran it to visualise the sentiment regarding the recent release of Java 8.

    I thought I’d have a look at the #Maharauk14 hashtag and follow  over the next few months as we progress toward the big event. So far there are 5 tweets using that hashtag.

     

    Screen Shot 2014-03-26 at 13.51.29

     

    The sentiment analysis isn’t very useful on so few, but it’s worth a look at the tag cloud now and to compare it to the final result.

     

    Screen Shot 2014-03-26 at 13.51.55

    To compare approaches I’ve also set up a hashtag archive on GoogleDocs using Martin Hawksey’s template: http://mashe.hawksey.info/2012/01/twitter-archive-tagsv3/ which does require twitter API keys and what not, but is rather good.


  2. WordPress for Android

    March 26, 2014 by Robin Englebright

    I’ve been following the Learning Analytics conference tweets today,  and was looking at their poster session over lunch on my Android phone,  a nexus 4. I was quite impressed that I could read the site and even the posters on my tiny phone,  guessing it was some fancy responsive design site…  I was a bit surprised to find it was yet another WordPress site. (like this one)
    At the bottom of the page they were advertising the WordPress for Android app.  So I’ve downloaded it and am using it to write this post.  Pretty neat.

    image

    There’s all the functionality  I need,  and the most useful features are right at hand…  Or finger. Because its a native app not just a Web page I can switch between apps and check links without fear of losing what I’ve typed into a Web form field.

    image

    To top it off the Google play store tells me that Web guru Brian Kelly has given it a thumbs up.
    So there you have it,  WordPress blogs and therefore http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk blogs look good on a mobile device,  and there’s a free app to help create and control your content.
    Back to the Learning Analytics briefly it’s worth noting that there is data emerging that indicates that for your students the mobile device is likely their main device,  and unless you are writing for mobile,  you may  just not get read…
    Next post on mobile stats and learning Analytics I think.


  3. Hello world!

    March 25, 2014 by Robin Englebright

    Ahoy Hoy,

    Delighted to find we are running EduBlogs at UoB, and I’ve imported my old posts from robwork.wordpress.com (which was previously rob-work.posterous.com). I apologise for the degraded images, I guess that’s what happens when you save a copy of a copy of a copy.

    WordPress continues to improve at a shocking rate, and included in this particular bundle is a whole bunch of cracking technology, like the podcast widget. Record something, post it and the feed is built automatically.

    I’ll pinch my son’s microphone tomorrow and record a demo.

    Rob

     


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