Month: October 2020

Full data for #Covid19uk during UK lockdown

On By scotpublichealthLeave a comment

This blog provides access to data on tweets using the #Covid19UK hashtag during the UK lockdown, the first day of which began on 24 March 2020. The data were extracted using TAGS, and then mapped using NodeXL. There were of course other UK-focused hashtags used during this period and some UK-based Covid-19 tweeting that did not use any hashtag. However it was unfeasible to capture all the data. I therefore stuck with one hashtag all the way through. You can see further information, including other search terms and ways of presenting data, in a tweet thread. These data are updated on a weekly basis (except where there is too much data to plot at once, in which case they are charted by day). There’s more about this work on the BMJ Opinion blog.

Details are provided below, but you may want to start with the summary outputs by month between March/ April and December. These summarise the top tweets (by number of retweets received) until end of July 2020, before moving to a different approach from August 2020 onwards where I attempt to capture more diversity in tweeters by making sure that no tweeter has more than 3 tweets in the summaries. Click to go to the Wakelet summary. Note that some tweets may have subsequently been deleted by Twitter or the tweeter, and some users will have left Twitter or been suspended. Accordingly, I have included PDF summaries that capture a permanent record. Links to the PDF summaries are included in the Wakelet summaries for each month:

From March 2022 I have not been producing Wakelet summaries, but the full data are available in NodeXL maps (data at end of each NodeXL report):

I aim to combine outputs from this period into a summary Wakelet when time.

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