Ferret

Be first to breaking news on Twitter.

Ferret is a powerful tool for finding first-person, eye-witness accounts of major events through Twitter.

It allows journalists to go back in time and find tweets immediately before the flood of noise and activity that accompanies heavily-reported news.

After entering your search term, Ferret returns a graphical representation of the density of tweets over time. The interactive interface lets you pull tweets from the beginnings of an event, before the noise of opinion and outrage takes over.

Ferret was created by:

• Giovanni Charles*
• Jeshua Maxey*
• Philip Nye**
• Ashley Pace**
• Kadhim Shubber**

*hacker
**hack

It began life at Build The News, a hackathon put on by The Times/Sunday Times digital news team. Further details on its development can be found here and here.

All the code for Ferret is open source, released under the MIT license.

Run Locally

Once you have the repo cloned run:

npm install

You must have a mongod instance running on your machine. Information can be found here: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/

Then to spin up the server type:

npm start

The app is now accessible at http://localhost:3000

Create a file in the data folder called twitterapi.json

Write your app information in the following format:

{
  "key": "APP KEY",
  "keySecret": "APP KEY SECRET",
  "token": "APP TOKEN",
  "tokenSecret": "APP TOKEN SECRET"
}

Notes on Polymer

Some things yet to be addressed:

• the bower install step (executed automatically after npm install) hasn't been fully tested
• gulp-sass doesn't consider certain obscure, shadowDOM specific CSS selectors valid. To compile sass run sass --watch public/css/src/main.scss:public/css/main.css from the low-pass directory and run gulp serve, NOT simply gulp. This requires sass to be installed (run gem install sass).