From the about page:
Welcome to the Flax UKMP application, providing search and analysis of tweets posted by UK members of Parliament.
This application started life during a hackday organised by Flax for the Enterprise Search Meetup for Cambridge in the UK. During the day, the participants split into groups working on a number of different activities, two of them using a sample of Twitter data from members of the UK Parliament’s House of Commons. By the end of the day, both groups had small web applications available which used the data in slightly different ways. Both of those applications have been used in the construction of this site.
The content is gathered from four Twitter lists: one for each of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, and a further list for the smaller parties. We extract the relevant data, and use the Stanford NLP software to extract entities (organisations, people and locations) mentioned in the tweet, and feed the tweets into a Solr search engine. The tweets are then made available to view, filter and search on the Browse page.
The source code is available in the Flax github repository. Do let us know what you think.
I don’t think programmers are in danger from projects like this one, primarily because they work with the “data” and don’t necessarily ingest a lot of it.
Readers, testers on the other hand, I fear that in sufficient quantities, tweets from politicians could make the average reader dumber by the minute.
As a safety precaution, particularly in the United States, have multiple copies of Shakespeare and Dante about, just in case anyone’s mind seizes while reading such drivel.
Readers should also be cautioned to wait at least 10 to 15 minutes for they attempt to operate a motor vehicle. 😉