Welcome to epitweetr!

[lauespinosa]

👋 Welcome to epitweetr!

ECDC developed epitweetr that allows users to automatically monitor trends of tweets by time, place and topic, with the aim of detecting public health threats early through signals, such as an unusual increase in the number of tweets. It was designed to support public health experts with the early detection of threats from infectious diseases but can be extended to all hazards and other fields of study by modifying the topics and keywords.

20 April 2023: Due to the changes in the Twitter API access levels, ECDC will discontinue the use and maintenance of epitweetr for the time being.

epitweetr includes an interactive web application, based on the R package Shiny, with five pages:

1. Dashboard, where a user can visualise and explore tweets, and download the associated outputs and data;
2. Alerts page, where you can view the current alerts and associated information, and train machine learning models for alert classification on user defined categories;
3. Geotag evaluation page, where you can evaluate the geolocation algorithm and provide annotations for improving its performance;
4. Data protection page, where the user can search, anonymise and delete tweets from the epitweetr database to support data deletion requests;
5. Configuration page, where you can change settings and check the status of the underlying processes;
5. Troubleshooting page, with automatic checks and hints for using epitweetr with all its functionalities.

🤔 Where to start?

• Read epitweetr vignette and user manual
• Check available translations of epitweetr v1 documentation
• Install epitweetr and start collecting tweets
• Check our training discussions for videos on how to use epitweetr and how to install epitweetr version 2.0 and above and other material about epitweetr and epidemic intelligence.
• Check the results from epitweetr v1 evaluation (peer-review manuscript)
• Share your experience of using epitweetr with the epitweetr community
• Ask any question in the Q&A discussion
• Report bugs and/or issues
• Share your suggestions or ideas
• Respond to our short survey to know more about the epitweetr community
• Share your related work on Twitter monitoring for public health
• Check what are the next planned releases
• Check an article on epitweetr in the Open Source Observatory

Happy signal 🔎 detection ❗