Researchers are beginning to key into the movement too, not just as users, but also as active investigators of the dynamics and utility of these new technologies as they emerge and grow. One of the amazing effects of these social networking sites is the wealth of data they can provide, and now scientists are taking advantage of the huge amount of public content from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Wikipedia to answer all kinds of new questions.

For example, investigators showed that Twitter is a useful tool for tracking H1N1 here and here; that content disputes in Wikipedia reflect geopolitical instability; and that virtual social networks can create collective emotional states.

Today, we added to this growing body of work with a report of a Twitter-based “hedonometer” that can be used to quantify the societal happiness of large populations. The authors used an amazing library of 46 billion words from nearly 4.6 billion tweets posted over almost three years by over 63 million unique users – a collection that would have been essentially impossible to obtain without the Twitter-verse.

The paper reports various trends in happiness – people are happier on the weekend, and the word “Christmas” is associated with high happiness levels, as opposed to “flu” and “Iraq,” which rank at the bottom – but the real advancement of the paper is its quantitative approach to the huge Twitter-based dataset. While scientists now have access to these huge datasets, they must first face the challenge of classifying and organizing the huge amounts of social information so they can conduct meaningful research into areas that have not previously been explored.

Image courtesy of La Fabrique de Blogs

Twitter is a microblogging site that give users like PLoS 140 characters to answer the simple question “what are you doing?”.

For a while we’ve been following Marcia on Twitter, she’s a Brazilian based Science Communicator, specializing in biomedicine and a member of the National Association of Science Writers-USA.  She travels around her country teaching students in some of the best hospitals and universities how to write good manuscripts and powerpoints. She uses PLoS articles extensively in her classes as a teaching aid. Here are some of her exercises:

1) In the abstract below, identify what information belongs to each section of the article (introduction, Material and Methods, Results and Discussion). For this task she uses a PLoS Pathogens paper entitled Viral Paratransgenesis in the Malaria Vector Anopheles gambiae.

2) In the introductions below, identify the following: background information, the question the article aims to answer, and the approach used by the authors to answer/test their hypothesis. For this task she uses two PLoS ONE articles, one entitled Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science, and the other Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk.

3) In the discussion below, indicate all the places where the author needs to add a reference (for this she removes the indication of references from the text and show the original version when they finish the exercise). For this task the PLoS ONE article she uses is Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk.

4) For the Power Point Workshop, she asks them to read the PLoS Computational Biology article entitled Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article and pretend they are the authors of the paper who were invited for a 10-minute presentation on the subject in an international meeting. This requires them to learn how to identify the main message and prepare no more than 5 to 6 slides to be presented in only 10 minutes.

We’re always delighted to know that PLoS articles, freely accessible to everyone, are being used to train the next generation of scientists in the skills of good scientific communication. We also encourage this art form through our editors summaries and through articles such as the Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published, from a collection about best practice for career-minded scientists in PLoS Computational Biology.