Researchers at the George Washington University are part of a multi-institutional initiative to create an open database tracking online attitudes toward COVID-19, an essential tool for researchers and public health professionals working to slow the pandemic.
David Broniatowski, an associate professor of engineering management and systems engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, spearheads the project alongside colleagues from GW, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland. He uses web and social media data to understand important problems in public health, including shifting attitudes toward vaccination.
The project, Social Media for Public Health: COVID-19, has already collected several large datasets, including a broad set of tweets containing keywords related to COVID-19 and narrower datasets like Persian-language tweets on the pandemic and tweets containing racist, anti-Chinese hashtags.