Twitter Sociolinguistics in the Unix Shell

In this note, I'll show how to do a very rough sociolinguistic study of data acquired from the Twitter API, using shell scripting tools only. The data comes in JSON format, so I'll focus on parsing that. If you want to learn more about Unix shell, Ken Church's classic Unix for Poets is a great way to start.

The sociolinguistic hypothesis that we'll test is that the English future tense system is shifting towards increasing use of the less formal "going to" in place of the more formal "will" (see, e.g., Tagliamonte and D'Arcy 2009). According to the sociolinguistic method of apparent time, we expect to find that older people remain more likely to use the outgoing form "will", and younger people are more likely to use the incoming form "going to". Let's see whether this holds up in Twitter.

We will use classic shell tools grep, sed, awk, cut, sort, etc. I am not a shell expert, and there are likely better ways to do many of these things. You can get lots of opinions about these topics on stackexchange and stackoverflow, among other places. (Thanks to @WladimirSidorenko for several helpful comments on improving the examples and presentation!)

Looking at the data

Twitter data is stored on our group's server in gzipped text files that contain one JSON object per line. If we combine zcat (cat for zipfiles) with head, we can examine the first line of one such file:

[jeisenstein3@conair new-archive]$ zcat tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz | head -1
","id":58371299,"id_str":"58371299","indices":[3,17]}],"symbols":[],"media":[{"id":696796012514406400,"id_str":"696796012514406400","indices":[36,59],"media_url":"http:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/CauESBbUcAAyeu-.jpg","media_url_https":"https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/CauESBbUcAAyeu-.jpg","url":"https:\/\/t.co\/GhVa5HQ5ok","display_url":"pic.twitter.com\/GhVa5HQ5ok","expanded_url":"http:\/\/twitter.com\/TheybelikeDar\/status\/696796019800014848\/photo\/1","type":"photo","sizes":{"small":{"w":340,"h":628,"resize":"fit"},"large":{"w":554,"h":1024,"resize":"fit"},"thumb":{"w":150,"h":150,"resize":"crop"},"medium":{"w":554,"h":1024,"resize":"fit"}},"source_status_id":696796019800014848,"source_status_id_str":"696796019800014848","source_user_id":58371299,"source_user_id_str":"58371299"}]},"extended_entities":{"media":[{"id":696796012514406400,"id_str":"696796012514406400","indices":[36,59],"media_url":"http:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/CauESBbUcAAyeu-.jpg","media_url_https":"https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/CauESBbUcAAyeu-.jpg","url":"https:\/\/t.co\/GhVa5HQ5ok","display_url":"pic.twitter.com\/GhVa5HQ5ok","expanded_url":"http:\/\/twitter.com\/TheybelikeDar\/status\/696796019800014848\/photo\/1","type":"photo","sizes":{"small":{"w":340,"h":628,"resize":"fit"},"large":{"w":554,"h":1024,"resize":"fit"},"thumb":{"w":150,"h":150,"resize":"crop"},"medium":{"w":554,"h":1024,"resize":"fit"}},"source_status_id":696796019800014848,"source_status_id_str":"696796019800014848","source_user_id":58371299,"source_user_id_str":"58371299"}]},"favorited":false,"retweeted":false,"possibly_sensitive":false,"filter_level":"low","lang":"en","timestamp_ms":"1455353581659"}

This is a simple pipeline, which pipes the output of zcat through the command head -1. (Check out the comment from @WladimirSidorenko on the dangers of using pipes.) Anyway, the structure of the JSON file is:

{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2",etc}

However, the values can themselves contain nested JSON objects. Anyway, we want to pull out two fields: "text" and "user.name".

Using a JSON parser

The easy way to do this is using a json parser, like jq. The following command will pull out the text field from the first three json lines that contain the substring "going to be".

zgrep 'going to be' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | head -3 | jq .text

The result is:

"@StJuliansFC @CwmbranTown hope our games on going to be a nightmare catching up on all these games!"
"im going to be by myself though im scared"
"RT @carterreynolds: Magcon may never be the same but we're ALWAYS going to be one big happy family 😊"

To get the text and the username, you can do this:

zgrep 'going to be' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz | head -3 | jq --raw-output '"\(.user.name)\t\(.text)"'

Results:

machen afc	@StJuliansFC @CwmbranTown hope our games on going to be a nightmare catching up on all these games!nicola	im going to be by myself though im scared
Love yoυ Cαм	RT @carterreynolds: Magcon may never be the same but we're ALWAYS going to be one big happy family 😊

The format of the jq command is a little funny: I don't know why you have to escape the opening parentheses, but not the closing ones.

Getting the text with Sed and Grep

If you don't have jq, or you want to learn to use more general tools, you can use Sed (streaming editor) to capture each of these fields. We're going to use Sed's "s" command. The syntax is this command is essentially:

sed s/find/replace/options

where find specifies a pattern to match and replace specifies what to replace that pattern with. We'll always use a single option, /g which says to execute this replacement "globally" -- every time possible in each line.

One key-value pair per line

As a first step, let's try to break up these big JSON blocks into one key-value pair per line.

zcat tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz | sed 's/,\"/\n/g' | head -n 5

Results:

"
id":58371299
id_str":"58371299"
indices":[3,17]}]
symbols":[]

Note that this command does not respect JSON's nested structure. For our purposes, that won't matter, but if there were nested "text" fields, we might be in trouble.

Capture groups

Next, to get the relevant text, we can use a capture group. We want to capture the field after the "text" key. Here's how we'll do it:

sed s/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\".*/\1/g

This says:

• match all characters before observing the string "text":" (note the escaped quotation marks).
• then match a sequence non-quotation characters, [^\"]. The brackets indicate a group (this is a regex), the carrot indicates negation, and then we have the escaped quotation mark.
• by putting (escaped) parens around this pattern, we indicate we want to capture it, \([^\"]*\)
• then match the closing quote, and all other characters in the line
• in the replace string, \1 means print the capture group

We call:

zcat tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\".*/\1/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z]' | head -3

which uses grep to filter the output to make sure it starts with an alphabetic character. Here are the first three results:

https:\/\/t.co\/QuRvL8exJZ
Que alguien me duerma de una \ud83d\udc4a, \ud83d\ude4f.
relationship status: https:\/\/t.co\/eON4iSSjvz

Now let's use a more complicated capture pattern to get the name too. For the name, we will require that it be two, capitalized alphabetic strings, [A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*. This is a trick to trade recall for precision, since there are a lot of garbage names in Twitter. Here's what we run:

zcat tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\",.*name\":\"\([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\)\".*/\1\t\2/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z].*' | head -3

Notice that the replace string now is \1\t\2: print the two capture groups, with a tab between them. Here's the output:

https:\/\/t.co\/QuRvL8exJZ	Selena Gomez
Gusto ko ng katext	Roymar Buenvenida
RT @NikitaLovebird: \u0915\u0947\u091c\u0930\u0940\u0935\u093e\u0932~ \u0926\u093e\u0926\u0930\u0940 \u091a\u0932\u094b\u0917\u0947 \n\u0911\u091f\u094b\u0935\u093e\u0932\u093e~ \u0939\u093e \u0939\u093e \u0939\u093e \u0939\u093e \n.\n.\n\u0915\u0947\u091c\u0930\u0940\u0935\u093e\u0932~ JNU \u091a\u0932\u094b\u0917\u0947 \n\u0911\u091f\u094b\u0935\u093e\u0932\u093e~ \u0928\u0939\u0940\u0902\n\u0907\u0938\u092e\u0947 \u0915\u0947\u091c\u0930\u0940 \u0905\u0902\u0915\u0932 \u0915\u094d\u092f\u093e \u0915\u0930 \u0938\u0915\u0924\u0947 \u0939\u0948???\n\u2026	Sahil Kataria

Putting zgrep in front

We're wasting time processing a lot of text strings that are not of interest. So let's put a grep at the front of the pipeline, so that we start with that:

zgrep 'going to be ' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\",.*name\":\"\([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\)\".*/\1\t\2/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z].*' | head -3

Here are the results:

MGBACKTOWEMBLEY	Matt Goss
God Brat 1, can spew contempt. World champion at ten. He's going to be a fun teenager.	Craig Short
I've got a new toaster. I've a feeling finding an optimum setting is going to be quite the journey. What a time to be alive.	Boring Tweeter

Notice that the first example doesn't include "going to be" in the text! The string must appear somewhere else in the JSON, maybe in the profile.

Postfiltering with grep

The solution is to use grep twice: once as a prefiltering step, and once as a postfiltering step. I find that this is a typical design pattern in streaming from big data: use a fast low-precision filter first, then a slower high-precision filter at the end.

zgrep 'going to be ' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\",.*name\":\"\([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\)\".*/\1\t\2/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z].*' | grep 'going to be ' | head -5

Here are the results:

God Brat 1, can spew contempt. World champion at ten. He's going to be a fun teenager.	Craig Short
I've got a new toaster. I've a feeling finding an optimum setting is going to be quite the journey. What a time to be alive.	Boring Tweeter
I've got a new toaster. I've a feeling finding an optimum setting is going to be quite the journey. What a time to be alive.	Boring Tweeter
I've got a new toaster. I've a feeling finding an optimum setting is going to be quite the journey. What a time to be alive.	Boring Tweeter
I'm going to be on Broadcasting House on Radio 4 tomorrow explaining why I actually quite enjoy Valentine's Day *ducks*	Henry Jeffreys

This time I took the first five hits, because the toaster tweet got repeated three times for some reason. We'll deal with that later.

Collecting names

We only want the names of the individuals using these words. We can collect these using cut.

zgrep 'going to be ' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\",.*name\":\"\([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\)\".*/\1\t\2/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z].*' | grep 'going to be ' | head -5 | cut -f 2

Results:

Craig Short
Boring Tweeter
Boring Tweeter
Boring Tweeter
Henry Jeffreys

Let's write these to a file, one for a each pattern:

zgrep 'going to be ' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\",.*name\":\"\([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\)\".*/\1\t\2/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z].*' | grep 'going to be ' | cut -f 2 | tee ~/going-to-be-all-names.txt

zgrep 'will be ' tweets-Feb-14-16-03-35.gz  | sed 's/.*\"text\":\"\([^\"]*\)\",.*name\":\"\([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\)\".*/\1\t\2/g' | grep -E '^[A-Za-z].*' | grep 'will be ' | cut -f 2 | tee ~/will-be-all-names.txt

Instead of the usual > redirect, I've used tee, which will print to standard out, as well as write to the file.

Filtering names

One thing we notice is that one guy, "Cameron Dallas", seems to account for a lot of these messages. Let's just count each name once.

sort -u ~/will-be-all-names.txt | cut -f 1 -d\  | uniq -c | tee will-be-name-counts.txt

Here's what's happening in this pipeline:

• sort -u alphabetically sorts all names, and returns the unique entries
• cut -f 1 -d\ selects only the first name, by cutting on a single whitespace delimiter. This is valid because we are only admitting names that contains exactly two whitespace-delimited tokens.
• uniq -c computes the count of all unique entries. uniq requires that its input is already sorted, but we have this from the sort call at the beginning of the pipeline.

Looking up ages per name

Let's get the top names for each set:

sort -nr ~/will-be-name-counts.txt  | head -5

Results:

10 The
10 David
8 Michael
8 Chris
7 Mark

sort -nr ~/going-to-be-name-counts.txt | head -5

Results:

3 Taylor
3 Nathan
3 Josh
3 Jon
3 Hannah

Whose are older? Some answers are online: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=M&Name=Nathan

Pulling web data

We can also pull data directly from this site, using the helpful curl command:

curl http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/names/M/N/Nathan.txt

This data is field-delimited by a comma. We will use awk to reorganize it so that the column containing the counts of living people is first. Then we will sort on this column, to find the year in which the greatest number of living people was born with name:

curl http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/names/M/N/Nathan.txt | awk -F, '{ print $3"\t" $1 }' | sort -n | cut -f 2 | tail -n 1

Results: 2004

The awk command awk -F, '{ print $3"\t"$1 }' says:

• Use the comma as a field delimiter
• Print the third field, then a tab, then the first field

Pulling data for each name

We want to get this data for all names. Let's see how we can iterate over the lines in a file. We'll use the for command, and then use $(command) to indicate a variable whose values are defined by the output of a sequence of other unix commands:

for name in $(sort -nr ~/will-be-name-counts.txt | head -5 | sed 's/\([^[:alpha:]]*\)//g');  do echo $name; done

Next, we'll take these names, and dynamically construct appropriate URLs to pull their age statistics from the from the website. Then we'll run our awk postprocessing script to get the ages.

for name in $(sort -nr ~/will-be-name-counts.txt | head -5 | sed 's/\([^[:alpha:]]*\)//g'); do 
 echo $name; 
 curl -s http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/names/M/${name:0:1}/$name.txt | awk -F, '{ print $3"\t"$1 }' | sort -n | cut -f 2 | tail -1; 
done

Note that the URLs require us to specify male or female. The above command line only gets male results. Let's add another for loop to iterate over genders. (@WladimirSidorenko notes that the iteration style for gender in {'M','F'} was only supported since Bash 4.0, so you may prefer the "old school" alternative for gender in M F.)

for name in $(sort -nr ~/will-be-name-counts.txt | head -5 | sed 's/\([^[:alpha:]]*\)//g'); do 
 echo $name; 
 for gender in {'M','F'}; do 
  curl -s http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/names/$gender/${name:0:1}/$name.txt | awk -F, '{ print $3"\t"$1 }' | sort -n | cut -f 2 | tail -1; 
 done; 
done

Surprisingly enough, most of these names have significant counts for both girls and boys. But here are the final results:

The
     ul { list-style: none; margin: 25px 0; padding: 0; }
     ul { list-style: none; margin: 25px 0; padding: 0; }
David
1960
1983
Michael
1970
1986
Chris
1961
1961
Mark
1960
1968

We get an error for the non-name "The", which returns an HTML string. For the names that work, most of them are for people born in the 1960s. Now for "going to be":

for name in $(sort -nr ~/going-to-be-name-counts.txt | head -5 | sed 's/\([^[:alpha:]]*\)//g'); do 
 echo $name; 
 for gender in {'M','F'}; do 
  curl -s http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/names/$gender/${name:0:1}/$name.txt | awk -F, '{ print $3"\t"$1 }' | sort -n | cut -f 2 | tail -1;
 done;
done

Taylor
1992
1993
Nathan
2004
1985
Josh
1979
ul { list-style: none; margin: 25px 0; padding: 0; }
Jon
1964
1958
Hannah
2004
2000

Taylor, Nathan, and Hannah all peaked after 1990; Josh peaked in the late 1970s, and only Jon dates back to the 1960s.

This data, limited though it is, supports the hypothesis: "going to be" is favored by younger writers on Twitter.

Next steps

Now that you know how to do variationist sociolinguistic analysis in the Unix shell, you may wonder whether one should do this.

It will hopefully be obvious that the analysis presented here is not robust enough to include a research paper. A classical variationist sociolinguistic approach would be to treat the future form as a linguistic variable, and run a logistic regression to estimate the impact of age on the form of this variable. Even better would be a mixed effects model, to control for author-level idiosyncrasies. I won't say this is impossible in the Unix shell, but at the very least, it is the type of thing that one only does when one is trying hard to make some kind of point. A more realistic path forward would be to use the Unix shell to select a relevant set of data, and then write the output to CSV files that could easily be opened as data frames in R or Python.