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).