Popular opinion and the reception of the microbiome as an emerging field according to data mining on Twitter

The study of the human microbiome is a relatively new field of science. One that has launched a new understanding about the prevailing obesity epidemic and unveiled clues as to the origins of diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. While scientists publish research on links between colon cancer and our native microbiota, how is public opinion evolving?

I chose to use this question as the foundation of my Twitter data mining project. Fair warning: the audience and the posters on Twitter do not represent a random or an accurate sample of the population. Nevertheless, we can extract some interesting information about what this particular sample cares about.

First I wrote a script to live stream and capture tweets using the Twitter API, Tweepy and StreamListener (you can find full documentation on my GitHub account). A short snippet of my script: