Geoff Ford Political Science x Digital Methods

Command line tool: sn0rt (Social News 0 Research Tool)

sn0rt is a command-line software tool to automate realtime collection and analysis of topics on Twitter via its API. It tracks user-defined keywords and collects news articles being discussed or shared.

The Mapping LAWS project used sn0rt to monitor new web content (e.g. news stories, government and NGO reports, academic articles, and events) related to autonomous weapons (or killer robots). Web pages that were frequently shared on Twitter were sent (sn0rted) to a channel on our project Slack so project members could keep up to date with recent developments.

With the sale of Twitter and subsequent death of its API, development of the software ceased.

Skills & Tools: Python; Twitter API; Web scraping; Slack API.