How can researchers measure poverty and understand local development needs in places where conventional data collection is difficult or impossible? To overcome this obstacle, Rutgers researchers have for the first time used georeferenced content from Twitter (now known as X) as a poverty measurement tool, offering a new way to understand development from the ground up.
“This approach could transform how international aid and development work operates,” said Woojin Jung, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Social Work and the principal investigator of the study. “Instead of waiting years between expensive surveys, organizations could get real-time insights into community needs by analyzing what people are actually talking about online.”
The paper, “Digital Pulse of Development: Constructing Poverty Metrics from Social Media Discourse,” co-written by Jung and Tawfiq Ammari, an assistant professor of library and information science at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, with Andrew H. Kim, Charles Chear, Vatsal Shah, and Ying Hung, received an honorable mention in the Applied and Quantitative Modeling Category from the organization Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization.
Jung will present the paper and accept the award at the fifth Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization being held from Nov. 5 to Nov. 7 at the University of Pittsburgh. To read the full story.