From Center for Digital Education
Twitter Addresses Data Analysis Skill Shortage with UC Berkeley Class
By Tanya Roscorla
An elective class arms students with big data analysis skills that are in high demand....
Because users send 400 million tweets a day, Twitter needs complex algorithms to analyze all that data. And it needs skilled engineers to do the job. So it partnered with UC Berkeley on a class that teaches students how to analyze data using real tweets.
The "Analyzing Big Data with Twitter" class included lectures from UC Berkeley professors and 15 volunteers from Twitter on the technology behind the social network. These lectures were video taped and are available online for anyone to watch....
In one project, students analyzed Twitter interest graphs (who links to whom) and conversation graphs (who refers to whom), said Marti A. Hearst, professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information. Students made interesting visualizations for this assignment through simple graphing algorithms that showed hundreds of thousands of interests that people discussed online.
"To me, what was interesting was how much you can see about the different topics that do arise from who links to whom, especially if you're looking at more well-known people, not necessarily celebrities, but people who have a lot of influence in the twitter sphere," Hearst said....