I am pleased to announce the latest title in Morgan & Claypool’s series on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services: Social Monitoring for Public Health Michael J. Paul, University of Colorado Mark Dredze, Johns Hopkins University Paperback ISBN: 9781681730950, $59.95 eBook ISBN: 9781681730967 August 2017, 183 pages https://doi.org/10.2200/S00791ED1V01Y201707ICR060 Abstract: Public health thrives on high-quality evidence, yet acquiring meaningful data on a population remains a central challenge of public health research and practice. Social monitoring, the analysis of social media and other user-generated web data, has brought advances in the way we leverage population data to understand health. Social media offers advantages over traditional data sources, including real-time data availability, ease of access, and reduced cost. Social media allows us to ask, and answer, questions we never thought possible. This book presents an overview of the progress on uses of social monitoring to study public health over the past decade. We explain available data sources, common methods, and survey research on social monitoring in a wide range of public health areas. Our examples come from topics such as disease surveillance, behavioral medicine, and mental health, among others. We explore the limitations and concerns of these methods. Our survey of this exciting new field of data-driven research lays out future research directions. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / A New Source of Big Data / Public Health: A Primer / Social Data / Methods of Monitoring / Public Health Applications / Limitations and Concerns / Looking Ahead / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies Visit this title’s abstract page on our website: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00791ED1V01Y201707ICR060 Morgan & Claypool Bookstore Link: http://www.morganclaypoolpublishers.com/catalog_Orig/product_info.php?products_id=1102 Series: Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services Editor: Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill http://www.morganclaypool.com/toc/icr/9/4 ######################################################################## to manage your DLF-ANNOUNCE subscription, visit diglib.org/announce