Twitter Lets Researchers Scan Its Vast Public Data

The micro-blogging site has finally given access to its vast database to a selected pool of researchers to study tweets and find answers to a variety of issues.

As part of its ambitious data grant programme, Twitter is allowing academic researchers across various fields to "go back and study things" over, with almost a decade of historical data, Washington Post reported.

While Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital are looking at tweets about food-poisoning cases to find answers to the spread of food-borne illnesses, researchers from the University of California at San Diego are studying whether happy people are likely to post happy images on Twitter.

A team from Netherlands University of Twente is looking at the effectiveness of social media campaigns encouraging early cancer detection.

Another team from the University of East London is probing the link between public tweets and sports team performance, the report added.

Recently, the media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), funded by a five-year, $10 million commitment from Twitter.

As part of the new programme, Twitter will also provide full access to its real-time, public stream of tweets as well as the archive of every tweet dating back to the first.

The new initiative will focus on the development of new technologies to make sense of semantic and social patterns across the broad span of public mass media, social media, data streams and digital content, MIT had said in a statement.