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Could your tweets be good for science?
If you’ve ever tweeted about having the sniffles or getting
a flu shot, you may be contributing to science without knowing it.
Researchers are increasingly turning to social media tools like Twitter to access information that has traditionally been very difficult to gather, such as data on public attitudes about flu shots (see Scientists use Twitter to track flu shot attitudes).
What are the pros and cons of using social networks for scientific research? Could they revolutionize the way scientists track opinions and detect outbreaks of infectious disease? In this issue, Dimensions invited Dr. Norm Vinson of NRC to answer questions about using social media in the name of science.
Click on a video below to see Dr. Vinson’s answer to each question.
Question 1: How could social media revolutionize the way researchers and health professionals collect information and analyze trends?
Question 2: How could this information be incorporated into public health surveillance systems?
Question 3: Should people whose information is being used in this way have any concerns about privacy?
Question 4: How far could social media monitoring go? Could our health and opinions one day be tracked in real time?
The scientist
Dr. Norm Vinson is a cognitive psychologist at the National Research Council of Canada. His recent work has focused on human-computer interaction in health informatics. He is a member of a team whose R&D is focused on extracting structure from unstructured medical text, particularly in the case of disease surveillance and outbreak detection. With several partners, they recently developed and deployed an award-winning syndromic surveillance system (see New tracking tool could hasten detection of flu outbreaks).
ISSN 1927-0275 = Dimensions (Ottawa. Online)
