DOLLY's Birthday!

We recently added a page outlining in more detail the DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You) project at the University of Kentucky to provide an overview to this ongoing and exciting project to make the massive datasets associated with geosocial media data (such as Twitter) accessible and explorable.  Yesterday we archived the 3 billionth tweet and it seemed worth recognizing DOLLY (along with all her algorithmic stream and process workers, since it was May Day) by declaring it to be her official one year birthday.  And since few of us can carry a tune (even with handles) we thought we'd let Satchmo serenade DOLLY.

We've posted some of our work based on DOLLY here including an analysis of tweets after the Boston bombing, Premier League fandom in the UK, Flooding in the UK, Thanksgiving tweets, earthquakes in Kentucky and racist tweets after the 2012 election.

Now that the Spring semester is winding down we will be stepping up our work and posts here.  We have a couple of really great posts that will be appearing over the next week or so.

We see DOLLY as both a key tool for our own work but also as a means to break down the technological barrier that is often present for researchers that would like to study big data but do not necessarily possess the required technical skills.  So stay tuned.