ScotPublicHealth has attempted to bring together insights around public health and social media techniques, with the intention of learning, networking and broadcasting positive and evidence-based messages about health and wellbeing. Over the course of this work I have learnt and refined techniques in extracting and processing large quantities of information from Twitter to source top quality content.
As with any new technique, there is a lot of learning, curiousity and experimentation required. You’re not sure where such work will lead, but you follow your nose. This particular post, which brings together three “big data” analyses over three days, has emerged out of relationships developed on Twitter, and a bit of luck.
My recent blog posts have looked at post hoc analyses of Twitter “big data” to describe conferences and awareness raising campaigns. This blog post looks at how “big data” can help identify high quality content to feature in a forthcoming campaign.
Air pollution, climate change and global warming are highly relevant to Public Health, with an up to date analysis provided in the Global Burden of Disease study in the Lancet. The #AirPollution hashtag is used in tweets throughout the year. I have extracted tweets that mention “air pollution” (from 12 and 13 June 2017) to identify potential content for “National Clean Air Day” on 15 June. The top 60 “air pollution” tweets (by number of retweets at 14:00 UK time on 13 June) are listed in a Wakelet summary. Searching for “air pollution” will identify tweets with the phrase itself or the hashtag. There is a wide range of content here, from Scientific American and Guardian news stories to other articles, infographics and tools, including posts and websites in French and one tweet in Japanese. The Guardian article was the most quoted “air pollution” story from this list. In order to demonstrate the range of people tweeting I have included each of the tweets in the top 60, but moving repeated stories to the end. The content (images, URLs etc) can be explored and used in new tweets specifically for the National Clean Air Day campaign.
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