Coronavirus and web data analysis
Power in the Pandemic
English - March 31, 2020 11:00 - 26 minutes - 6.15 MB - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsNews international development ngo aid humanitarian gender justice inequality campaigning social justice decolonizing Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Social media has the potential to profoundly influence the way society works. Social media has been used for understanding crowd sizes from Instagram posts and to analyse hate speech and to understand presidential elections. So, how can we use social media data to understand our current reality? Join the Real Geek team, Simone Lombardini and Alexia Pretari as they interview Nicole Schwitter, author of the recent paper Going digital: web data collection using twitter as an example.
In this episode, they will consider how twitter can be used to understand how society is reacting to coronavirus. What is “google flu” and how can this phenomenon help us understand the spread of coronavirus? How has the use of “#COVID” changed in its use over time in different countries? And, whilst social media data can be useful, what are its limitations and the ethical considerations around collecting online data?
This podcast was recorded at the end of March 2020.
Nicole Schwitter is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.
Alexia Pretari is an Impact Evaluation Adviser at Oxfam GB and Simone Lomardini is the Global Impact Evaluation Lead at Oxfam.
Links for publication and further reading
Going Digital: Web data collection using Twitter as an example. By Nicole Schwitter
Active Citizenship in Tanzania: Impact Evaluation of the 'Governance and Accountability through Digitalization' project. By Alexia Pretari
Read Simone's latest blog on twitter data analysis, the flour shortage and lockdown!
Covid-19 Outbreak: Tweet Analysis on Face Masks By Yanqing Shen
How did Twitter react to the Coronavirus pandemic? By Feng Lim