We interviewed researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago in the Health Media Collaboratory about their use of DiscoverText and the Gnip-enabled Power Track for Twitter to study smoking behavior. The team, led by Dr. Sherry Emery, explains why it is important to train and use custom machine classifiers to sort the millions of tweets they are collecting from the full Twitter fire hose. The UIC team strongly argues for the combination of good tools and highly reliable data.
Smoking Hot Data and Text Analytics: DiscoverText, Gnip, and the Health Media Collaboratory from Stuart Shulman on Vimeo.
