Reips, U-D & Garaizar, P. (2011) Mining Twitter: A source for psychological wisdom of the crowds - 10 views

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  #1 Jannicke Rye on 25 Mar 12

   

  Reips, U-D., and Garaizar, P. 2011. Mining Twitter: A source for psychological wisdom of the crowds. Accessed March 23, 2012 from http://www.springerlink.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/content/v7633x228u842kt2/fulltext.pdf
  
  This article talks about Twitter, and how researchers can assess via Twitter the effect of specific events in different places as they are happening and to make comparisons between cities, regions, or countries regarding psychological states and their evolution in the course of an event.
  The article focuses on a Web application called iScience Maps, which is designed to help researchers interested in social media analysis - specifically, mining the billions of 'tweets' on Twitter for scientific research. It talks about how information created by the behaviour of the masses, is leading to the emerging of 'wisdom of the crowds'. The application is targeted to researchers interested in mining Twitter, and it provides temporal and geospatial content analysis and a set of features for comparative search options.
  It also mentions one example, about a guy named David Crandall and his colleagues from Cornell University, and how they created maps of world regions from ca. 35 million geotagged photos that had been uploaded to Flickr. These maps show relative interest in motifs and places and may lead to applications in tourism, city planning, ecology, and economics.
  
  I found this article interesting, because it highlights different tools that will help to get more out of online services such as Twitter, and how it can benefit both people and organisations.

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Reips, U-D., and Garaizar, P. 2011. Mining Twitter: A source for psychological wisdom of the crowds. Accessed March 23, 2012 from <a href="http://www.springerlink.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/content/v7633x228u842kt2/fulltext.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.springerlink.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/content/v7633x228u842kt2/fulltext.pdf</a> <br /> <br /> This article talks about Twitter, and how researchers can assess via Twitter the effect of specific events in different places as they are happening and to make comparisons between cities, regions, or countries regarding psychological states and their evolution in the course of an event. <br /> The article focuses on a Web application called iScience Maps, which is designed to help researchers interested in social media analysis - specifically, mining the billions of 'tweets' on Twitter for scientific research. It talks about how information created by the behaviour of the masses, is leading to the emerging of 'wisdom of the crowds'. The application is targeted to researchers interested in mining Twitter, and it provides temporal and geospatial content analysis and a set of features for comparative search options. <br /> It also mentions one example, about a guy named David Crandall and his colleagues from Cornell University, and how they created maps of world regions from ca. 35 million geotagged photos that had been uploaded to Flickr. These maps show relative interest in motifs and places and may lead to applications in tourism, city planning, ecology, and economics. <br /> <br /> I found this article interesting, because it highlights different tools that will help to get more out of online services such as Twitter, and how it can benefit both people and organisations.</div>

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  #2 samara hartnett on 06 Apr 12

   

  I found this article a little hard to digest at first. A lot of the tools used in the research I had no idea even existed and some of the terminology also drew blanks. But this reflects more on my lack of exposure to API's and Twitter than the article itself. I feel this article is valuable in that it exposes the ability of researches to drill down into the twitter sphere and its data, tapping into a global conversation. I was surprised to find out just how much and what kinds of information could be isolated from the global feed. This is also very useful because it made me begin to think about ways twitter data might be used. Like Jannicke mentions in his article summary the overall effect of this data mining results in 'temporal and geospatial content analysis'. The statistical ability to associate a percentage of twitter activity within separate countries was fascinating. The results surprised me in the sense that countries often highlighted as being less technologically advanced clearly find use for the technology just the same. For example, yes America is the highest tweet generator at 25% but in 3rd and 4th place was Indonesia with 12% and Brazil with 11% (Garaizar, Reips 2011, p. 636). This article does stray a little from the topic of 'Twitter and Political protest' but it does manage to contextualise the possible use of data after or during and event or protest. Overall the article really made me think about how and what online social data could reveal about our societies. It takes us one step closer to notions of a 'globalisation' when services like iScience Maps can literally put every tweet on the map.

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">I found this article a little hard to digest at first. A lot of the tools used in the research I had no idea even existed and some of the terminology also drew blanks. But this reflects more on my lack of exposure to API's and Twitter than the article itself. I feel this article is valuable in that it exposes the ability of researches to drill down into the twitter sphere and its data, tapping into a global conversation. I was surprised to find out just how much and what kinds of information could be isolated from the global feed. This is also very useful because it made me begin to think about ways twitter data might be used. Like Jannicke mentions in his article summary the overall effect of this data mining results in 'temporal and geospatial content analysis'. The statistical ability to associate a percentage of twitter activity within separate countries was fascinating. The results surprised me in the sense that countries often highlighted as being less technologically advanced clearly find use for the technology just the same. For example, yes America is the highest tweet generator at 25% but in 3rd and 4th place was Indonesia with 12% and Brazil with 11% (Garaizar, Reips 2011, p. 636). This article does stray a little from the topic of 'Twitter and Political protest' but it does manage to contextualise the possible use of data after or during and event or protest. Overall the article really made me think about how and what online social data could reveal about our societies. It takes us one step closer to notions of a 'globalisation' when services like iScience Maps can literally put every tweet on the map.</div>

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  #3 Jarrad Long on 08 Apr 12

   

  This article discusses the usefulness of Twitter as a tool for research. Researcher Pablo Garaizar suggests that monitoring large volumes of tweets and identifying trends in what users are saying - a technique called data mining - can produce valuable results for researchers conducting socio-behavioural research. He describes (in agonising detail) the web application iScience Maps, which his team developed to expedite the process of data mining Twitter, before moving on to describe a study he conducted to test the effectiveness of the technique.
  
  Garaizar describes his attempt to replicate the findings of a study run in 1993 which apparently demonstrated that the names Alexander, Charles and Kenneth are associated with ambition, intelligence and creativity, whilst the names Otis, Tyrone and Wilbur are not. Garaizar poses "If these names' having the connotation of a personality characteristic really holds, this likely should be apparent when Twitter is mined, because attributions to persons, such as 'Charles is an intelligent guy,' frequently appear in text-based message services like Twitter." So, using iScience Maps, he searched Twitter for one name at a time, in combination with the terms 'ambitious', 'intelligent' and 'creative'. His findings supported the findings of the 1993 study: Alexander, Charles and Kenneth were indeed found in conjunction with the positive terms multiple times, while the other three names were never found in conjunction with those terms.
  
  Bizarre as Garaizar's example may be, the fact that tools like iScience Maps can provide insight into human psychology is incredible. The ability to examine the communications of thousands, potentially millions, of users and easily identify trends (both temporal and geographical) is something that will likely revolutionise research in the social sciences. One can imagine marketing agencies finding this type of insight into the minds of the masses very insightful too. In my opinion, mining Twitter is crowd-sourcing at its very purest - it's just a shame the word limit on this assessment prevents me from exploring that. My essay for module two probably will.

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">This article discusses the usefulness of Twitter as a tool for research. Researcher Pablo Garaizar suggests that monitoring large volumes of tweets and identifying trends in what users are saying - a technique called data mining - can produce valuable results for researchers conducting socio-behavioural research. He describes (in agonising detail) the web application iScience Maps, which his team developed to expedite the process of data mining Twitter, before moving on to describe a study he conducted to test the effectiveness of the technique. <br /> <br /> Garaizar describes his attempt to replicate the findings of a study run in 1993 which apparently demonstrated that the names Alexander, Charles and Kenneth are associated with ambition, intelligence and creativity, whilst the names Otis, Tyrone and Wilbur are not. Garaizar poses "If these names' having the connotation of a personality characteristic really holds, this likely should be apparent when Twitter is mined, because attributions to persons, such as 'Charles is an intelligent guy,' frequently appear in text-based message services like Twitter." So, using iScience Maps, he searched Twitter for one name at a time, in combination with the terms 'ambitious', 'intelligent' and 'creative'. His findings supported the findings of the 1993 study: Alexander, Charles and Kenneth were indeed found in conjunction with the positive terms multiple times, while the other three names were never found in conjunction with those terms. <br /> <br /> Bizarre as Garaizar's example may be, the fact that tools like iScience Maps can provide insight into human psychology is incredible. The ability to examine the communications of thousands, potentially millions, of users and easily identify trends (both temporal and geographical) is something that will likely revolutionise research in the social sciences. One can imagine marketing agencies finding this type of insight into the minds of the masses very insightful too. In my opinion, mining Twitter is crowd-sourcing at its very purest - it's just a shame the word limit on this assessment prevents me from exploring that. My essay for module two probably will.</div>

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