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Twitter for Health Data Research

Real-time social media data from platforms such as Twitter are a fantastic source of data - never has an individual been able to access historic opinions and watch them develop over time so trivially.

Overview

Thanks to Twitter's new academic tier we can target specific terms, locations, types of tweet and more.

This new academic tier allows access to Twitter's full archive search. With this you can grab up to 10,000,000 tweets a month from any time in Twitter's history. If your research requires you to grab Twitter data from months or years ago, this event is for you.

In this event we will see if we can detect Covid-like symptoms before outbreaks occurred, allowing us to explore how we could have intervened and predict an outbreak weeks before it happens. In this 1-hour talk, participants learn:

  • Why social media data is useful
  • Why Twitter is a great data source
  • Data collection from Twitter using Twarc
  • Some analysis of this data in Python
About the Instructor

Joseph Allen is a Research Associate at the UK Data Service , based at the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research at the University of Manchester. For the last year Joe has been focusing on making Twitter easier to use, whilst also exploring the ethics of this access.

Additional Resources
Twitter analytics for health data research

Additional materials

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