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Social Monitoring for Public Health
Michael J. Paul and Mark Dredze
www.morganclaypool.com
ISBN: 9781681730950 paperback
ISBN: 9781681730967 ebook
DOI 10.2200/S00791ED1V01Y201707ICR060
A Publication in the Morgan & Claypool Publishers series
SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON INFORMATION CONCEPTS, RETRIEVAL, AND SERVICES
Lecture #60
Series Editor: Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Series ISSN
Print 1947-945X Electronic 1947-9468
Social Monitoring for Public Health
Michael J. Paul
University of Colorado
Mark Dredze
Johns Hopkins University
SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON INFORMATION CONCEPTS, RETRIEVAL, AND SERVICES #60
ABSTRACT
Public health thrives on high-quality evidence, yet acquiring meaningful data on a population remains a central challenge of public health research and practice. Social monitoring, the analysis of social media and other user-generated web data, has brought advances in the way we leverage population data to understand health. Social media offers advantages over traditional data sources, including real-time data availability, ease of access, and reduced cost. Social media allows us to ask, and answer, questions we never thought possible.
This book presents an overview of the progress on uses of social monitoring to study public health over the past decade. We explain available data sources, common methods, and survey research on social monitoring in a wide range of public health areas. Our examples come from topics such as disease surveillance, behavioral medicine, and mental health, among others. We explore the limitations and concerns of these methods. Our survey of this exciting new field of data-driven research lays out future research directions.
KEYWORDS
social media, web data, public health, data science
For Dad. –MJPFor Chava, Gilah, Hadar, and Micah. –MHD
Contents
2.1.1 Public Health Surveillance
2.2.1 Limitations of Traditional Data
2.2.2 Opportunities for Social Monitoring
3.2.1 Active vs. Passive Monitoring
3.3.1 General-purpose Social Media
3.3.2 Domain-specific Social Media
3.3.3 Search and Browsing Activity
