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ry
Microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness.
Vieweg et al ( 2010)1 explore how microblog posts can be extracted for use in systems that support what is called common situational awareness (SA) that is posits helpful processes and strategies for those seeking awareness in emergency situations. Traditionally SAs literature investigates how different team or group members (ie Pilots and military personnel) and communities could work together to collect, analyse, synthesise and disseminate information. It explores how it enables the intergroup and intragroup processes to integrate to create common situational awareness. This work analyses Twitter posts generated during two concurrent emergency events in North America - OK Oklahoma Grassfires and RR Red River Floods. By doing so it aims to develop information extraction (IE) techniques so individuals, groups and communities can use information contributed by others in a social media context. The Twitter posts collection process started when the residents of RR valley were under the threat of flooding and ended when most of the flood danger had passed. While the OK Twitter ran from the day prior to the grassfire onset and lasted until the fire threat ceased. These periods of collections were 51 days for RR and 6 days for OK. An API with search terms of the names of the events was used to collect the tweets. These terms were chosen through preliminary investigation of a public Twitter stream to find a relevant sample of data with little noise. The results are displayed in the table below.

Vieweg, S., Hughes, A. L., Starbird, K., & Palen, L. (2010). Microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness. Presented at the CHI 10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM

University of Southampton 2013

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Collection period Used terms No of Tweets Unique Tweet authors The sum of Twitterers entire streams Local users only

Red River Floods (RR)

51 day

red river , redriver

13,153

4983

4,592,466

49 >> 19,162 Tweets 46>>2779 Tweets

Oklahoma Grassfires (OK)

6 days

oklahoma, okfire, grass fire , grassfire

6676

3852

1,986,091

The study continued to collect the entire Twitter stream for each user in order to understand how the Tweets retrieved with the research term fit into the Twitterers stream. The data was then filtered to give the users streams that contains more than three Tweets that have the search terms. The first step in coding the dataset was to code each Tweet to become either on- or off- topic using criteria collectively developed by four researchers and reviewed by at least two reviewers. The Tweets were then analysed manually to identify the local users who are not affiliated with a group or organization and those who were geographically local to the events. The location of the users were inferred through the manual investigation. The researchers used in-house software called E-Data (EDV) to parse, visualise, and code each data sets. EDV allowed the development and customisation of the coding schemes. The themes of Twitterers posts were identified and this allowed for a ground-up approach for understanding each event. The researchers in this stage were able to identify categories describing the information being communicated. Then they described features and characteristics of Tweets in each data set that enhanced the overall understanding of each event. These inclueded geo-location, locationreferencing and situational update information in addition to the descriptions of high yield Twitterers, re-tweeted information, and markedness.

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P!per Summ!ry
The compression between the two events in terms of broadcasting information about geolocation proved that those who experienced the threat or effects of wildfire are used more geo-location information. The location-referencing, which is the cases when the Tweets contained one place as a reference for other place, was considered a communicatory phenomenon of significant potential for data extraction but this has been earmarked for future research. Situational update is another feature the researchers identified and organised. This was described under these categories : Warning, Preparatory Activity, Fireline/Hazard Location, Flood Level, Weather, Wind, visibility, Road conditions, advice, Evacuation Information, Volunteer Information, Animal Management, and Damage/Injury reports. All these categories were identified based on the qualitative coding. The authors then explain the results they found from the comparison between the two events regarding each of the categories and relate them to the nature of each threats. All these findings contribute to building concepts and tools that can be employed in future emergencies to support the affected communities with situation awareness.

University of Southampton 2013

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