Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving sociologically relevant demographics from Twitter

Sociological Research Online

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 74-84

  Sloan, Luke ^a   Morgan, Jeffrey ^a   Housley, William ^a   Williams, Matthew ^a   Edwards, Adam ^a   Burnap, Pete ^a   Rana, Omer ^a  

^a CARDIFF UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

New Social Media, Demographics, Twitter, Social Media Analytics, Social Science, Sampling

Indexed keywords

EID: 84884229586     PISSN: None     EISSN: 13607804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5153/sro.3001     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. AOIR (2012) Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Version 2.0 - Recommendations from the Association of Internet Researchers Working Committee. Available at: http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf [Accessed 22-02-13].
2. ARGAMON, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J. & Shimoni, A. R. (2006) Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts, Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 23(3) p. 321-346.
3. ASUR, S. & Huberman, B. (2010) Predicting the Future with Social Media. Social Computing Lab, HP Labs in Palo Alto.
4. BARRACUDA LABS Internet Security Blog (2012) The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business, https://www.barracuda.com/blogs/labsblog?bid=2989 [accessed 11-03-13].
5. BRUNS, A., Burgess, J., Crawford, K. & Shaw, F. (2012) #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis communication in the 2011 South East Queensland floods, Research Report - Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/dev/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/qldfloods-and-@QPSMedia.pdf [Accessed 11-03-13].
6. BRUNS, A., Burgess, J., Highfield, T., Kirchhoff, L. & Nicolai, T. (2011) Mapping the Australian networked public sphere, Social Science Computer Review, 29(3) p. 277-287
7. BURGESS, J. & Bruns, A. (2012) Twitter archives and the challenges of big social data for media and communication research, M/C Journal, 15(5) p. 1-7.
8. BURNAP, P., Rana, O. & Avis, N. (2013) Making sense of self reported socially significant data using computational methods, in Housley, W. Edwards, A. Williams, M. & Williams, M. (Eds.), Special Issue, Computational Social Science: Research, Design and Methods, International Journal of Social Research Methods, 16(3) p. 215-230.
9. CHENG, Z., Caverlee, J. & Lee, K. (2010) You are where you tweet: a content-based approach to geo-locating twitter users, Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 10).
10. CHENG, N., Chandramouli, R. & Subbalakshmi, K. P. (2011) Author gender identification from text, Digital Investigation, 8(1) p. 78-88
11. CHU, Z., Widjaja, I. & Wang, H. (2012) Detecting social spam campaigns on Twitter, Proceedings of the Tenth ACNS International Conference, [doi://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31284-7_27]
12. COLL, S., Glassey, O. & Balleys, C. (2011) Building social networks ethics beyond privacy: a sociological perspective, International Review of Information Ethics, 16 p. 47-53.
13. DEBATIN, B., Lovejoy, J. P., Horn, A. & Hughes, B. N. (2009) Facebook and online privacy: attitudes, behaviours and unintended consequences, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15 p. 83-108.
14. DODDS, P. S. & Danforth, C. M. (2010) Measuring the happiness of large-scale written expression: songs, blogs, and presidents, Journal of Happiness Studies, 11(4) p. 441-456.
15. EDWARDS, A., Housley, W., Sloan, L., Williams, M. & Williams, M. (2013) Computational social science and methodological innovation: surrogacy, augmentation or reorientation?, in Housley, W. Edwards, A. Williams, M. & Williams, M. (Eds.) Special Issue, Computational Social Science: Research, Design and Methods, International Journal of Social Research Methods, 16(3) p. 245-260.
16. FININ, T., Murnane, W., Karandikar, A., Keller, N, Martineau, J. & Dredze, M. (2010) Annotating named entities in Twitter data with crowdsourcing, in Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazons Mechanical Turk (CSLDAMT 10) (p. 80-88). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
17. Gayo-Avello, D. (2012) I Wanted to Predict Elections with Twitter and all I got was this Lousy Paper: A Balanced Survey on Election Prediction using Twitter Data. Department of Computer Science, University of Oviedo (Spain).
18. GINSBERG, J., Mohebbi, M. H., Patel, R. S., Brammer, L., Smolinski, M. S. & Brilliant, L. (2009) Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data, Nature, 19(457) p. 1012-1014.
19. Hale, S., Gaffnet, D. & Graham, M. (2012) Where in the world are you? Geolocation and language identification in Twitter. Oxford Internet Institute Working Paper, http://www.geospace.co.uk/files/icwsm_paper2.pdf [Accessed 11-03-13]
20. Housley, W., Edwards, A., Williams, M. & Williams, M. (Eds.) (2013) Special Issue, Computational Social Science: Research, Design and Methods, International Journal of Social Research Methods, 16(3).
21. HUFFAKER, D. A. & Calvert, S. L. (2005) Gender, identity and language use in teenage blogs, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(2) article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html
22. JAFFE, J. M., Lee, Y. E., Huang, L. & Oshagan, H. (1999) Gender identification, interdependence and pseudonyms in CMC: language patterns in an electronic conference, The Information Society, 15 p. 221-234
23. KAPADIA, A., Henderson, T., Fielding, J. J. & Kotz, D. (2007) Virtual walls: protecting digital privacy in pervasive environments, Pervasive Computing, 4480 p. 162-179.
24. LANG, P. G. (2007) Publicly private and privately public: Social networking on YouTube, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1) article 18. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/lange.html
25. LEWIS, P., Newburn, T., Taylor, M., Mcgillivray, C., Greenhill, A., Frayman, H. & Proctor, R. (2011) Reading the riots: investigating Englands summer of disorder, Report - The Guardian and The London School of Economics. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46297/1/Reading%20the%20riots%28published%29.pdf [Accessed 11-03-13].
26. MENDES, P., Passant, A. & Kapanipathi, P. (2010) Twarql: tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Semantic Systems. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1839762
27. Michael, J. (2007) 40000 Namen, Anredebestimmung anhand des Vornamens, http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/07/17/182/ (in German) [accessed 15-10-12].
28. MISLOVE, A., Lehmann, S., Ahn, Y-Y., Onnela, J. P. & Rosenquist, J. N. (2011) Understanding the demographics of Twitter users, Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
29. NARAYANAN, A., & Shmatikov, V. (2009) De-anonymizing social networks, IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Oakland, CA. Available: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf
30. NARAYANAN, A., & Shmatikov, V. (2008). Robust de-anonymization of large sparse datasets (How to break anonymity of the Netflix prize dataset.) IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Oakland, CA. Available: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0610105v2
31. NISSENBAUM, H. (2010). Privacy in context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
32. OFFICE FOR NATIONAL STATISTICS (2011) 2011 Census - Population and Household Estimates for England and Wales.
33. PARKER, M. (2010) Ethical and moral dimensions of e-research, in Dutton, W. & Jeffreys, P. (Eds), World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
34. LANGUAGE DETECTION LIBRARY FOR JAVA, http://code.google.com/p/language-detection/ [last accessed October 2012].
35. SAKAKI, T., Okazaki, M. & Matsuo, Y. (2010) Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors, presented at WWW 2010, April 26-30, Raleigh, NC, USA.
36. SAVAGE, M. & Burrows, R. (2007) The coming crisis in empirical sociology, Sociology, 41 p. 885-899.
37. SAVAGE, M. & Burrows, R. (2009) Some further reflections on the coming crisis of empirical sociology, Sociology, 43 p. 762-722.
38. Scarfi, M. (2012) Social Media and the Big Data Explosion. Forbes. Available at: [Accessed 15-11-12].
39. SMITH, D. (2012), How Many People Use the Top Social Media?. Digital Market Ramblings. Available at: [Accessed 15-07-12].
40. TAM, D. (2012) Facebook Processes More than 500TB of Data Daily. CNet. Available at: [Accessed 15-11-12].
41. THOMSON, R. & Murachver, T. (2001) Predicting gender from electronic discourse, British Journal of Social Psychology, 40 p. 2193-2208.
42. THELWALL M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D. & Kappas, A. (2010) Sentiment strength detection in short informal text, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(12) p. 2544-2558.
43. TUMASJAN, A., Sprenger, T., Sandner, P. & Welpe, I. (2010) Predicting elections with Twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment, Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
44. US SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION Top Names Over the Last 100 Years. http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/century.html (US Social Security Administration Website) [Accessed 15-10-12].
45. YAHOO! PlaceFinder, http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/ [last accessed October 2012].
46. Yuen, M. C., King, I. & Leung, K.S. (2011) A survey ofcrowdsourcing systems, InSocialCom 11: Proceedingsof The Third IEEE International Conference on Social Computing.