epitweetr tool

The R-based tool epitweetr allows users to automatically monitor trends of tweets by time, place and topic, with the aim of detecting public health threats early through signals, such as an unusual increase in the number of tweets. It was designed to support public health experts with the early detection of threats from infectious diseases but can be extended to all hazards and other fields of study by modifying the topics and keywords.

The epitweetr package includes an interactive web application (based on the R package Shiny) with six pages:
1. Dashboard, where a user can visualise and explore tweets, and download the associated outputs and data;
2. Alerts page, where you can view the current alerts and associated information, and train machine learning models for alert classification on user defined categories;
3. Geotag evaluation page, where you can evaluate the geolocation algorithm and provide annotations for improving its performance;
4. Data protection page, where the user can search, anonymise and delete tweets from the epitweetr database to support data deletion requests;
5. Configuration page, where you can change settings and check the status of the underlying processes;
6. Troubleshooting page, with automatic checks and hints for using epitweetr with all its functionalities.