Divide by Something

Snippets and technical observations from the Knight Lab at Northwestern University.

[dividebysomething]

Some tricks for handling non-ascii text when analyzing tweets

For Twxplorer, we needed to clean up "terms" in tweets so as to not clutter the counts with emoji and other noise.  

In the first implementation, we simply forced unicode strings to ascii using this python code:

s = s.encode('ascii', 'replace').replace('?', '').lower()

This broke down when we wanted to support non-English languages, which often use non-ascii characters such as ñ, ç and é. Here's a solution which seems to work, at least for the languages we support. I think it would break with CJKV languages.

import unicodedata s = filter(lambda x: unicodedata.category(x)[0] != 'C',s.lower())

[dividebysomething]

A Good "how-to" on adding and creating custom tile sets in Leaflet, which is something we plan on adding to StoryMapJS.

[dividebysomething]

This doesn't just apply to iOS6. I ran into a very confusing problem in developing StoryMapJS in which two things needed to animate at the same time. In chrome (webkit) everything worked fine, but in Safari and WebKit one of the animations would not work or was seriously slow. The problem was one animation used hardware acceleration and the otherone wasn't. Triggering hardware acceleration on both animations fixed the problem.

-webkit-transform: translateZ(0);

-webkit-perspective: 1000;

-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;