Storing tweets in objects
This code loads tweets from a text file gathered previously, stores them in an arrayList of objects, then sorts them by username and date, assigning x and y coordinates based on that sorting. Next it analyzes the text of the tweets and compares them against a list of the 15 most common words from the data sample. Each word is given a weight based on how frequently it is used. This weight is added together to create the Z coordinate for the tweet, which is then assigned to the objects z coordinate property. Right now it is set up to work with exactly 100 tweets. On my list is rewriting it to process all 73,000 of the tweets I gathered and to check the array which writes the final file to remove any null values (because they break the visualization code).
Download the Processing code. Feel free to use this in your own projects. I've licensed it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. For more information visit Creative Commons. Also, I'd love it if you'd send me a note on Twitter if you use it. I'm excited to see what you're working on. I'm @murrayc.