About QUAC

QUAC ("Quantitative analysis of chatter" or any related acronym you like) is a package for acquiring and analyzing social internet content. Features:

• Reliably collect tweets from the Twitter Streaming API and convert them into an easy-to-parse, de-duplicated, well-ordered, and fast TSV format.
• Estimate the origin location of tweets with no geotag. (But see issue #13.)
• Careful preservation of Unicode throughout the processing pipeline.
• Various cleanup steps to deal with tweet quirks, including very rare ones (we've seen certain weirdnesses in only one of our 1.3+ billion tweets). That is, we deal with the special cases so you don't have to.
• Parallel processing using various combinations of make, joblib, and a simple map-reduce framework called makereduce which is included. (But see issue #15.)

QUAC is open source under the Apache license and was formerly known as Twepi ("Twitter for epidemic analysis").

How to get QUAC

Download it from our Github project. See also the :doc:`getting_started` section.

If you find QUAC useful

Please send us a note at [email protected] if you use QUAC, even for small uses, and/or star the project on GitHub. This type of feedback is very important for continued justification of the project to our sponsors.

Note that for many uses of QUAC (especially research) you are ethically oblicated to cite it. For guidelines on how to do this, see :doc:`citing`.

For more information

• Documentation is online at <http://reidpr.github.io/quac>. (Note: this may describe a different version of QUAC than the one you have.)
• Current documentation is rooted at doc/index.html. (You'll probably need to build it first.)
• Most scripts have pretty help which you can print using the --help option and/or look at in comments at the top of the script. Modules also usually have good docstrings.