[Air-L] Research on Twitter - a couple of questions

Sarita Yardi sarita.yardi at gmail.com
Tue Jan 17 04:34:59 PST 2012


Hi Monica,

This paper can probably answer some of your questions.

Abstract: "Little research exists on one of the most common, oldest, and
most utilized forms of online social geographic information: the “location”
field found in most virtual community user profiles. We performed the first
in-depth study of user behavior with regard to the location field
in Twitter user profiles. We found that 34% of users did not provide real
location information, frequently incorporating fake locations or sarcastic
comments that can fool traditional geographic information tools. [....]"
http://www.brenthecht.com/papers/bhecht_chi2011_location.pdf


----
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi


On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 12:29 AM, Monica Barratt <tronica at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear AoIR members
>
> Recently there have been more scholarly articles published using
> Twitter data in the health field. I've found myself as a peer-reviewer
> of one such article. In case the authors happen to be subscribed, I'll
> keep the exact topic quiet... but basically what the authors are doing
> is using Twitter's advanced search function to compile a database of
> Tweets which they then subject to a simple content analysis.
>
> I have done my own research and discussed the issue with local expert
> Axel Bruns, however I'm still a bit unclear on a couple of points, and
> wondered if anyone reading could assist me:
>
> 1. The authors draw samples of Tweets over a specific time frame from
> specified US cities. They appear to assume that by using the advanced
> search option 'Near this place' and entering the city name will bring
> up all tweets from that city or surrounds (see
> https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced ). But wouldn't that only bring
> up the tweets from people who have nominated their home city or
> geolocated their tweets? Don't many users do neither of these things
> and therefore the corpus of data would be incomplete?
>
> Can anyone verify this ... and also does anyone know if there is any
> research on the proportion of Twitter users whose location would be
> known and therefore would be included in such a dataset?
>
> 2. The authors use profile images to ascertain the approximate age and
> gender of account holders. In my experience, many people use profile
> images that do not represent themselves - eg. celebrities or past
> images of themselves or images of themselves with others.
>
> Is this an accurate or useful way of dealing with Twitter profile data
> or is it too flawed as a technique to be useful?
>
> While I'm not an expert in Twitter research, it seems to me that
> Twitter research is on more solid ground when using a hashtag to
> identify a corpus of Tweets, as this is the method Twitter users
> employ too.
>
> Thanks for your thoughts/help
>
> Monica
>
> Research Fellow @ National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University
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