14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has decided to share all its public tweets with the researchers over at the MIT Media Lab. Furthermore, it is also going to give them $10 million (€8 million) to try and get some insight from the trove of data.
The team or researchers will work under the title of “Laboratory of Social Machines” and will have access to all the live public tweets, as well as the archives of years of tweets sent by everyone with a public profile since 2006.
The raw data will be used to create some new platforms for both individuals and institutions to identify, discuss, and act on pressing societal problems, as per a statement from MIT.
The group hasn’t exactly made a list of its goals, but researchers seem to be looking into focusing on general consensus on the social media, which is often difficult to do due to the hundreds of thousands of opinions shared online.
“Pattern discovery and data visualization will be explored to reveal interaction patterns and shared interests in relevant social systems,” the Laboratory of Social Machines explained.
New tools to analyze data are on the way
They will be working on developing collaborative tools and mobile apps, which will enable new forms of public communication and social organization. They’re even planning to create tools to help out journalists to tap into the many tweets on the platform and to identify trends.
“The Laboratory for Social Machines will experiment in areas of public communication and social organization where humans and machines collaborate on problems that can’t be solved manually or through automation alone. Social feedback loops based on analysis of public media and data can be an effective catalyst for increasing accountability and transparency — creating mutual visibility among institutions and individuals,” says Deb Roy, an associate professor at the Media Lab who will lead the LSM, and who also serves as Twitter’s chief media scientist.
Twitter’s Dick Costolo, the company’s CEO, states that with the new investment, Twitter is seizing the opportunity to go deeper into research and to understand what role Twitter has in the way people communicate.
It should be quite interesting to follow on what the MIT team comes up with and what discoveries it brings to light about the way we communicate nowadays via social media. Twitter has already established itself as an important player in the way the world finds out the latest news, as well as a way to indicate what TV shows are being welcomed by the public and which ones aren’t that loved.