Twitter launches Data Grants to help researchers study subjects with tweet data

Twitter is a goldmine of data and that is no exaggeration. Information gathered from Twitter data in the past has helped researchers chart out studies in the past, including using geotagged tweets to map racism across the US and to track sexual assault cases in India. Now, Twitter has introduced a new pilot via which select research institutes will get access to its public and historical data.   The program is dubbed Twitter Data Grants and will give research institutes a shot in the arm by providing data and information gleaned from tweets. Raffi Krikorian for Twitter made this announcement on Twitter’s engineering blog. Krikorian explains that with over 500 million tweets a day sent out by users the world over, Twitter holds within itself an expansive set of data that can be used to learn about a variety of topics that involve aspects such as health and events. For example, he writes, one can track where the flu may hit or how the world rings in the New Year.   These big data questions have been difficult for researchers to tackle and Twitter admits that it’s been difficult to collaborate with researchers for the same. Therefore, it decided to come up with the Twitter Grants program to help connect academicians with Twitter information.   In order to participate in the program, researchers and institutes can send their proposals to Twitter by March 15 and the service will select a small number of proposals to receive free datasets. So if you’re researching a localised topic or even something with a global impact, you can study tweets around the topic and the locations where they came from using the data.   Twitter plans to enable this using Gnip, one of its certified data reseller partner which is already working with Twitter to give selected institutions free access to datasets. Twitter will also let some of these institutes collaborate directly with Twitter’s engineers and researchers.