Tipping the scales: how geographical scale affects the interpretation of social media behavior in crisis research

Rachel Samuels, Jiajia Xie, Neda Mohammadi and John E. Taylor ()
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Rachel Samuels: Georgia Institute of Technology
Jiajia Xie: Georgia Institute of Technology
Neda Mohammadi: Georgia Institute of Technology
John E. Taylor: Georgia Institute of Technology

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2022, vol. 112, issue 1, No 23, 545-564

Abstract: Abstract Our relationship with technology is constantly evolving, and how we use technology in disasters has evolved even faster. Understanding how to utilize human interactions with technology and the limitations of those interactions will be a crucial building block to contextualizing crisis data. The impact of geographic scale on behavioral change analyses is an unexplored facet of our ability to identify relative severities of crisis situations, magnitudes of localized crises, and total durations of disaster impacts. Within this paper, we aggregate Twitter and hurricane damage data across a wide range of geographic scales and assess the impact of increasing scale on both the recognition of extreme behaviors and the correlation between activity and damage. The power-law relationships identified between many of these variables indicate a direct, definable scalar dependence of social media aggregation analyses, and these relationships can be used to inform more intelligent, equitable, and actionable social media usage in emergency response.

Keywords: Crisis response; Crisis informatics; Social media; Vulnerability; Hurricanes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11069-021-05193-8

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