Interdisciplinarity

“Twitterology: a new science?”

November 10, 2011 1365

Ben Zimmer writes in the New York Times about Twitter’s appeal to social scientists who are looking for real-time language data and social interactions to analyze. He writes: “Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its immediacy – and its immensity. Instead of relying on questionnaires and other laborious and time-consuming methods of data collection, social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.”

Examples of how Twitter has been used by researchers include tracking on-the-ground sentiment in Egypt and Libya over the course of the Arab Spring, looking at how emotions may relate to the rhythms of daily life, and building maps of regional language use across the United States.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa
Impact
March 27, 2024

Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa

Read Now
Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact
Impact
March 21, 2024

Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact

Read Now
Coping with Institutional Complexity and Voids: An Organization Design Perspective for Transnational Interorganizational Projects
Research
March 19, 2024

Coping with Institutional Complexity and Voids: An Organization Design Perspective for Transnational Interorganizational Projects

Read Now
The Importance of Using Proper Research Citations to Encourage Trustworthy News Reporting
Impact
February 26, 2024

The Importance of Using Proper Research Citations to Encourage Trustworthy News Reporting

Read Now
Revolutionizing Management Research with Immersive Research Methods

Revolutionizing Management Research with Immersive Research Methods

In this article, Anand van Zelderen, Nicky Dries, and Elise Marescaux reflect on their decision to explore nontraditional research.

Read Now
A Behavioral Scientist’s Take on the Dangers of Self-Censorship in Science

A Behavioral Scientist’s Take on the Dangers of Self-Censorship in Science

The word censorship might bring to mind authoritarian regimes, book-banning, and restrictions on a free press, but Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at […]

Read Now
Using Forensic Anthropology to Identify the Unknown Dead

Using Forensic Anthropology to Identify the Unknown Dead

Anthropology is the holistic study of human culture, environment and biology across time and space. Biological anthropology focuses on the physiological aspects of people and our nonhuman primate relatives. Forensic anthropology is a further subspecialty that analyzes skeletal remains of the recently deceased within a legal setting.

Read Now
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

1 Comment
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
@empsocsci

Social scientists/humanities scholars should treat this idea with caution. The degree of algorithmic (or even intentional) pre-filtering of twitter’s various API feeds is unclear, tweeters are clearly a non-representative (& non-random) sample who are self-selecting a) as users/tweeters and b) as those who choose to make tweets public and even c) those who choose to allow geo-coding of tweets if that’s your analytic interest. Response bias is therefore unclear and potentially unknowable. Generalisability of results is therefore dubious. I’d encourage anyone thinking about using these and related kinds of data to consider @katecrawford and @zephoria’s Six Provocations for Big Data… Read more »