drag2share: Twitterâs data grants will be used to research food poisoning, cancer, happiness
Twitter announced on Thursday the six winners of the data grants program that the social networking platform announced in February. The winning researchers will get access to the entire history of tweets to search for posts relevant to their studies.
Here is the list of winners and winning projects, as described by Twitter:
- Harvard Medical School / Boston Children’s Hospital (US): Foodborne Gastrointestinal Illness Surveillance using Twitter Data
- NICT (Japan): Disaster Information Analysis System
- University of Twente (Netherlands): The Diffusion And Effectiveness of Cancer Early Detection Campaigns on Twitter
- UCSD (US): Do happy people take happy images? Measuring happiness of cities
- University of Wollongong (Australia): Using GeoSocial Intelligence to Model Urban Flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia
- University of East London (UK): Exploring the relationship between Tweets and Sports Team Performance
However, as interesting as these projects might be, they represent just a small fraction of the types of questions that could be researched using data from Twitter and other social networking sites. As I wrote when Twitter announced its grant program, there’s a bit of tension between researchers who want access to data and companies that want — often for good reason — to keep it largely under wraps. For this program alone, Twitter says it received more than 1,300 submissions.
Gnip, which Twitter bought this week and which runs a service around letting users access social data, is supplying the data for the grant recipients. One can only imagine the volumes of data they’ll be receiving: Gnip recently supplied me with one month worth of bitcoin-related tweets, which numbered more than 1.3 million and spanned dozens of metadata categories. Measuring tweets about sports for any prolonged period? Ouch.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
- 10 ways big data changes everything
- Data discovery tools and companies to watch in 2014
---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)
Posts
