Twitter Data for Migration Studies

Given the gaps and limitations of traditional data for migration research, social big data have been proposed to fill and complement them. Amongst various types of social media data, user-generated content from Twitter is considered a valuable resource in migration studies. As recent works have shown, Twitter can indeed be used to study various migration-related problems such as estimating migration stocks and flows, studying new migrant integration indices, evaluating cultural diversity, language mobility and social network activity. In this chapter, we provide an overview of various stages required to conduct a study on Twitter. We start with a series of recent works that employ Twitter data for migration studies. We then continue with more Technical description of the Twitter APIs and format of data. The relevant terms of service and the relation with the privacy and ethical concerns are discussed. Furthermore, we provide a description of example processing pipelines, i.e. natural language and geolocation processing. We also discuss gaps and biases of using Twitter. Overall, this chapter underlines the challenges and open issues that can be raised when using Twitter data in migration studies.