Twitter is a social microblogging platform that has rapidly increased in popularity over the last five years.  Users log on and enter messages (“Tweets”) of 140 characters or less, essentially broadcasting them to the world.  While much of the information posted on Twitter is difficult to discern meaning from, the sheer magnitude of users and Tweets has provided a wealth of information to researchers on important social topics. For example, on the day of the recent 2012 U.S. election, Twitter hit a peak of 327,452 tweets per minute and an overall of 31 million tweets just discussing the election. Some researchers have approached the “mining” of this Twitter data using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods.  Others, noting the lack of solid information about exactly who Tweets and who does not, see Twitter as a non-representative source of information and have decided to ignore the stream of data altogether. Join us for a 90-minute webinar to learn more about strengths and weaknesses in utilizing Twitter for social research, and how the advent of social networks is impacting traditional research approaches. We will also share our framework for approaching an analysis of this large-n text stream.

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