Online work force analyzes social media to identify consequences of an unplanned school closure – using technology to prepare for the next pandemic

We used the social media-monitoring platform Radian6
(San Francisco, CA) to retrospectively capture social media posts related to
the Chicago City School District closure in September 2012. Social media in dataset include posts from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, and comments
between September 8 and September 12, (two days before the strike started to
two days after the strike ended). We used the following combination of search
terms: “strike Chicago” AND “breakfast” OR “childcare” OR “daycare” OR “lunch”
OR “parent”.  A proximity score of “5” was
applied to the terms “strike” and “Chicago” (on a scale of 1–20, with 1 being
exact [i.e., strike and Chicago together]).
Column headings include:  Unique post identifying number (NUMBER), post content (CONTENT), social media provider (MEDIA_PROVIDER), and publishing date/time (PUBLISH_DATE).  
These posts were reviewed and categorized as relevant (related to impact of closure on students and their families) or irrelevant (describing political aspects of strike, welfare system, or other unrelated topics).  Relevant posts were further analyzed for underlying sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative).