Twitter as a means to study temporal behaviour.

Twitter as a means to study temporal behaviour.

Curr Biol. 2017 Sep 11;27(17):R830-R832

Authors: Roenneberg T

Abstract
Biomedical research has exploited vital and other statistics (e.g., birth or death rates) for almost 200 years [1]. The Internet has become a rich source of digital databases, which are being used for many lines of research (e.g., circadian and seasonal [2] or metabolism [3,4]). Internet-based studies generally investigate large populations while individual social media accounts are rarely used to analyse, for example, individual sleep-wake behaviour (e.g., youtu.be/wBNcP-LkpfA). I therefore applied time series analyses, commonly used in circadian and sleep research, to approximately 12,000 tweets sent from a single Twitter account (@realdonaldtrump; December, 2014 to March, 2017). The account was clearly used by different individuals/groups launching tweets from various devices. Among these, the Android phone was the most consistent over the years. Its tweet activity peaked twice a day (early morning and late night), and both peaks showed a strong seasonality by tracking dawn.

PMID: 28898641 [PubMed - in process]

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