Academics

Teams sought to develop innovative research programs using Twitter data

Twitter data is generated by a large number of people in realtime, is rapidly growing and easily accessible, and drawing interest from many research disciplines. Credit: enot-poloskun/iStock.comAll Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) is seeking teams to develop innovative research programs using Twitter data.

Proposals are invited for pilot projects aimed at using Twitter data in social science research. Twitter offers one of the most rapidly growing and accessible Big Data sources and provides significant opportunities to study social problems and advance the social and behavioral sciences. Letters of intent are due Nov. 5. For more information on the opportunity, visit SSRI’s Funding Mechanisms page.

Researchers are encouraged to use Twitter resources and infrastructure available through SSRI’s Computational and Spatial Analysis (CSA) Core. The data can be used for a variety of research topics including trajectory analysis, hot-spot analysis, trend topic analysis, and social network analysis. Twitter also can be used for enriching surveys and be linked to contextual data and data collected by mobile or wearable devices.

CSA Director Guangqing Chi, associate professor of rural sociology and demography and public health sciences, says that Twitter data has potential for expanding social science research because it includes a large amount of individual information that is longitudinal and georeferenced.

Chi also says that SSRI’s Twitter initiative is a major step for Big Data for social science research at Penn State.

“The use of Big Data for social science research is already a trend,” he said. “Staying ahead of the curve will maintain Penn State’s leadership position in computational social science and spatial analysis.”

Last Updated October 15, 2018

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