The FiveThirtyEight Twitter Bot

First, some basics. 

Here’s how I explained the Markov bot in this piece:

A basic Markov bot is a program that can take a random walk through how people write. If I make a dictionary of how I write, for instance — taking everything I wrote in a year, breaking it down into coherent fragments, and then breaking those fragments down to individual three-word phrases used to construct a sentence — I can use that dictionary to build a bot to replicate my speech.
The result of this random walk is typically a mildly coherent, often funny sentence or phrase that imitates the bones of how I speak. I downloaded every word that several colleagues and I wrote so we can replace all this expensive talent with simple python scripts.

So, long story short: If a proper noun appears in a tweet, please don’t construe it as libel. 

Each day, the bot derives tweets from the work of one writer. Here’s the basics of it: Monday is Ben Casselman, Tuesday is Mona Chalabi, Wednesday is Nate Silver, Thursday is Walt Hickey, Friday is Harry Enten, Saturday is Neil Paine, Sunday is Carl Bialik.

So, how’d I do it? I’ll post here later this week giving  step-by-step explainer once I know that, uh, it actually works. 

UPDATE: Alright, here’s your tutorial on how to make a thing like this.