What do people tweet all day?
We saw the American Time Use Survey earlier this week, but a paper has just been published using a different source of publically-available time use data.
The site timeu.se collects information from Twitter and parses it to extract activities. For example: bus
On weekdays lots of people catch the bus in to work, and then teleport home. Or perhaps commuting home is just less tweet-worthy.
In any case, the data could be useful for picking up strong trends. The new paper is about migraines, using time-of-day data from the website. The researchers found the expected differences between men and women, and between workdays and weekends/holidays, and the expected early morning peak, suggesting that tweet-mining at least isn’t completely bogus.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »