Recap: TwitterBot Workshop
On October 15, 2015 we met for the inaugural Feminist MakerSpace at UT Dallas. In honor of Ada Lovelace‘s birth bicentennial, we joined code and language in the creation of TwitterBots.
Members of the Feminist Research Collective joined with students and staff to create accounts to automate posting to Twitter. Some mashed up genres to create parody tweets. Others designed bots that tweet in response to a certain trigger. Others mined text to produce mathematical wordplay. Here is a list of the bots arising out of the workshop. All of the tools we used are listed below:
- @OBotler
- Created by Olivia Banner with Cheap Bots Done Quick
- A bot imagining a Hollywood that valued female-authored scifi as much as male-authored scifi
- https://twitter.com/OBotler
- @hangdman_ebooks
- Created by Matt Brown with Zach Whalen’s Google spreadsheet tutorial
- A markov chain generating bot based on Matt’s dissertation.
- https://twitter.com/hangdman_ebooks@hangdman_ebooks
- @IKnowTheseWords
- Created by xtine burrough
- I am a robot that reveals xtine’s wordhord, one word of the day at a time, with the help of my maker’s replies.
- @hooksbot
- Created by Kim Knight with IFTTT
- Tweets a bell hooks quote every time JP Morgan Chase’s stock rises by 1%.
- https://twitter.com/hooksbot
- @RobinCookBook
- Created by Kim Knight with Cheap Bots Done Quick
- A bot that imagines what if…Doctor and writer Robin Cook were widely credited with introducing the word ‘medical’ to the cookbook genre?
- https://twitter.com/RobinCookBook
- @Used_Couches
- Created by Jessica Murphy with IFTTT
- I am a bot that lets you know when someone posts a used couch listing to craigslist. Be careful where you sit.
- https://twitter.com/used_couches
- @StarWarsCity1
- Created by Jess Pritchett with Cheap Bots Done Quick
- A mashup of Star Wars and Sex in the City
- https://twitter.com/StarWarsCity1?lang=en
Some guidelines for automated tweeting:
- Twitter, “Automation Rules and Best Practices”
- Darius Kazemi, “Basic Twitter Bot Etiquette”
Tools we used during the workshop:
- Cheap Bots Done Quick
- Easily create TwitterBots that use replacement grammars
- Used for OBotler, StarWarsCity1, RobinCookBook
- http://cheapbotsdonequick.com/
- If This Then That (IFTTT)
- Create automated tweets using triggers from IFTTT’s partner platforms.
- Used for Used_Couches, hooksbot, IKnowTheseWords
- http://ifttt.com
- Zach Whalen, “How to Make a Twitter Bot with Google Spreadsheets, Version 04”
- Uses a Google spreadsheet to create replacement grammars or markov chains
- Used in Hangdman_ebooks
- http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot- with-google-spreadsheets-version-04/
Credits:
Organization and handout: Kim Knight