Twitter coverage of the Australian Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Society Conference 2017

You know the drill by now. Grab the tweets. Generate the report using RMarkdown. Push to Github. Publish to RPubs.

This time it’s the Australian Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Society Conference 2017, including the COMBINE symposium. Looks like a good time was had by all in Adelaide.

A couple of quirks this time around. First, the rtweet package went through a brief phase of returning lists instead of nice data frames. I hope that’s been discarded as a bad idea 🙂

Second, results returned from a hashtag search that did not contain said hashtags, but were definitely from the meeting. Yet to get to the bottom of that one. I treated ABACBS and COMBINE as one event for this analysis.

Third, given that most Twitter users have had 280 characters since about November 7, is this reflected in the conference tweets? It is not. In fact, most tweets seem to hit the hard limit of 140, which makes me wonder if users’ clients were not updated, or the R package has a hard-coded character limit in its parsing functions (longest = 148 characters).