How to change the background color in processing, according to whether a tweet has a positive or negative sentiment?

Question

I’m new to Processing and I’m trying to create an interactive infographic, in which the background colour changes according to whether the most recent tweet about an event contains positive or negative words. For a positive tweet the background will be yellow, and for a negative tweet it will be red.

I’ve got the project working so that it shows the latest tweets mentioning ‘wembley’ (the event) in console.

I’m stuck as to how I can find positive and negative words, within the text printed in the console data.

To try and do this I set a string array to list all the positive and negative words which I want to trigger the background color change:

String [] positiveWords = new String[6];
{
positiveWords [0] = "great";
positiveWords [1] = "love";
positiveWords [2] = "amazing";
positiveWords [3] = "fun";
positiveWords [4] = "brilliant";
positiveWords [5] = "good";
}

String [] negativeWords = new String[4];
{
negativeWords [0] = "bad";
negativeWords [1] = "hate";
negativeWords [2] = "terrible";
negativeWords [3] = "boring";
}

I then put an if statement in void draw()

  if (console.log = positiveWords)  {
    background (0, 100, 100);
  }

  if (console.log = negativeWords)  {
    background (255, 0, 0);
  }

this returns the error ‘expecting LPAREN, found ‘console’

I’ve been trying to find the answer by searching everywhere for days, but I’m at a loss! Any help would be very very much appreciated! Many thanks.

Full source code here:

import com.temboo.core.*;
import com.temboo.Library.Twitter.Search.*;


//string array to identify positive words
String [] positiveWords = new String[6];
{
positiveWords [0] = "great";
positiveWords [1] = "love";
positiveWords [2] = "amazing";
positiveWords [3] = "fun";
positiveWords [4] = "brilliant";
positiveWords [5] = "good";
}

//string array to identify negative words
String [] negativeWords = new String[4];
{
negativeWords [0] = "bad";
negativeWords [1] = "hate";
negativeWords [2] = "terrible";
negativeWords [3] = "boring";
}


// Create a session using your Temboo account application details
TembooSession session = new TembooSession("userName", "appName", "******");

// The name of your Temboo Twitter Profile 
String twitterProfile = "Twittersearch1";

// Declare font and text strings
PFont fontTweet, fontInstructions;
String searchText, tweetText, instructionText;

// Create a JSON object to store the search results
JSONObject searchResults;

void setup() {
  size(700, 350);

  // Set a search term and instructions

  searchText = "wembley";

  instructionText = "Press any key to load a new tweet about '"+searchText+"'";

  // Display initial tweet
  runTweetsChoreo(); // Run the Tweets Choreo function
  getTweetFromJSON(); // Parse the JSON response
  displayText(); // Display the response
}

void draw() {
  if (keyPressed) {
    runTweetsChoreo(); // Run the Tweets Choreo function
    getTweetFromJSON(); // Parse the JSON response
    displayText(); // Display the response
  }

  //if statements to change the background color

  if (tweetsResults = positiveWords)  {
    background (0, 100, 100);
  }

  if (tweetsResults = negativeWords)  {
    background (255, 0, 0);
  }
}


void runTweetsChoreo() {
  // Create the Choreo object using your Temboo session
  Tweets tweetsChoreo = new Tweets(session);

  // Set Profile
  tweetsChoreo.setCredential(twitterProfile);

  // Set inputs
  tweetsChoreo.setQuery(searchText);

  // Run the Choreo and store the results
  TweetsResultSet tweetsResults = tweetsChoreo.run();

  // Store results in a JSON object
  searchResults = parseJSONObject(tweetsResults.getResponse());
}

void getTweetFromJSON() {
  JSONArray statuses = searchResults.getJSONArray("statuses"); // Create a JSON array of the Twitter statuses in the object
  JSONObject tweet = statuses.getJSONObject(0); // Grab the first tweet and put it in a JSON object
  tweetText = tweet.getString("text"); // Pull the tweet text from tweet JSON object
}

void displayText() {
  println(tweetText); // Print tweet to console

 }

Answer 1

First of all, don't try to store your text in the console. The console is mostly for debugging.

Instead, store your text in a variable. You're actually already doing that, in the tweetText variable.

Next, use ArrayLists for your positiveWords and negativeWords. That will make searching through them easier.

Then use the split() function to break your tweetText into individual words. Check whether each of those words is in one of your ArrayLists.

Putting it together, it might look something like this:

void checkTweetText(){
   boolean containsPositive = false;
   boolean containsNegative = false;

   String[] words = split(tweetText, " ");
   for(String word : words){
     if(positiveWords.contains(word)){
       containsPositive = true;
     }
     if(negativeWords.contains(word)){
       containsNegative = true;
     }
   }

   if(containsPositive){
      //do something
   }
   if(containsNegative){
     //do something
   }
}

Note that you'll probably have to involve some more logic with splitting your text- you'll have to think about punctuation, etc.

Also, note that this is a pretty broad question. It's hard to answer general "how do I do this" type questions. It's much easier to answer questions like "I tried X, expected Y, but got Z instead". Try breaking your problem down into smaller steps- can you create a separate sketch that simply prints out whether a hardcoded word is good or bad? Can you then do the same for a hardcoded sentence? Start small and build incrementally instead of trying to take on your entire project at one time.