9 Using Twitter to Learn about the Autism Community Fig. 2: Number of ASD-related tweets we collected each day over the course of our data acquisition period; notice weekly periodicity. To make the usual day to day variability visible in the presence of the sharp peak on 2 April (World Autism Awareness Day) logarithmic scaling was used for ordinate values. The approximately three week gap in data collection during the 2014-2015 holiday period was caused by the failure of our computer system. much meaning themselves (e.g. articles and connectives), as well as all punctuation marks and emoticons. To illustrate the effects of our pre-processing we present a few examples. Looks like we will have more #autism research happening for children in #EarlyIn- tervention next year! :-) #VisualSupports #MobileTech look like autism research happen child earlyintervention visualsupports mobiletech Authors who see autism as “tremendously burdening” elicit dire views of autism from parents http://j.mp/1FyqXwF “Ethical approval: none” author see autism tremend burden elicit dire view autism parent url ethic approv none Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan 2014 Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct 8.0 8.5 9.0 9.5 10.0 10.5 11.0 11.5 12.0 12.5 Number of tweets (log) Original tweet: Pre-processed result: Original tweet: Pre-processed result: