Eat it, then tweet it

Developed by Wright State researchers, eDrugTrends software combs Twitter for information and trends related to cannabis products.

Excerpt

You spent all that time agonizing over just the right phrasing, paired it with the right hashtag, and tagged the right people. Well, it turns out those 140-character spurts of indelible wisdom aren’t completely useless after all. That is, if you’re talking about marijuana.

Researchers at the Center for Interventions, Treatment, and Addictions Research (CITAR) in Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine and the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) are harnessing the big-data potential of Twitter to monitor and analyze trends related to cannabis products, including marijuana edibles. The study is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Raminta Daniulaityte, Ph.D., and Amit Sheth, Ph.D., Principal Investigators).

Their study, “Those Edibles Hit Hard: Exploration of Twitter Data on Cannabis Edibles in the U.S.,” is the first-ever attempt to analyze Twitter data on marijuana edibles. And it has been published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, a peer-reviewed international journal that publishes original research, scholarly reviews, commentaries, and policy analyses in the area of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use and dependence.

For Francois R. Lamy, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in CITAR and Kno.e.sis, the process, and the results, are encouraging. He’s on the team that developed eDrugTrends, a software platform capable of processing social media data. Basically, his research starts after you hit tweet.

Read the entire story at daytoncitypaper.com