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1. Building a Real-Time Geo-Targeted Event Observation (Geo) Viewer for Disaster Management and Situation Awareness

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57336-6_7  

   Tsou, Ming-Hsiang; Jung, Chin-Te Jung; Allen, Christopher; Yang, Jiue-An; Han, Su Yeon; Sptizberg, Brian H.; Dozier, Jessica (May 2017, Progress in Location Based Services 2018, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography)

   Situation awareness plays an important role in disaster response and emergency management. Displaying real-time location-based social media messages along with videos, pictures, and hashtags during a disaster event could help first responders improve their situation awareness. A geo-targeted event observation (Geo) Viewer was developed for monitoring real-time social media messages in target areas with four major functions: (1) real-time display of geo-tagged tweets within the target area; (2) interactive mapping functions; (3) spatial, text, and temporal search functions using keywords, spatial boundaries, or dates; and (4) manual labeling and text-tagging of messages. Different from traditional web GIS maps, the user interface design of GeoViewer provides the interactive display of multimedia content and maps. The front-end user interface to visualize and query tweets is built with open source programming libraries using server-side MongoDB. GeoViewer is built for assisting emergency responses and disaster management tasks by tracking disaster event impacts, recovery activities, and residents’ needs in the target region. 

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2. A tale of three cities: uncovering human-urban interactions with geographic-context aware social media data

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s44212-022-00020-2  

   Yin, Junjun; Chi, Guangqing (December 2022, Urban Informatics)

   Abstract Seeking spatiotemporal patterns about how citizens interact with the urban space is critical for understanding how cities function. Such interactions were studied in various forms focusing on patterns of people’s presence, action, and transition in the urban environment, which are defined as human-urban interactions in this paper. Using human activity datasets that utilize mobile positioning technology for tracking the locations and movements of individuals, researchers developed stochastic models to uncover preferential return behaviors and recurrent transitional activity structures in human-urban interactions. Ad-hoc heuristics and spatial clustering methods were applied to derive meaningful activity places in those studies. However, the lack of semantic meaning in the recorded locations makes it difficult to examine the details about how people interact with different activity places. In this study, we utilized geographic context-aware Twitter data to investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of people’s interactions with their activity places in different urban settings. To test consistency of our findings, we used geo-located tweets to derive the activity places in Twitter users’ location histories over three major U.S. metropolitan areas: Greater Boston Area, Chicago, and San Diego, where the geographic context of each location was inferred from its closest land use parcel. The results showed striking spatial and temporal similarities in Twitter users’ interactions with their activity places among the three cities. By using entropy-based predictability measures, this study not only confirmed the preferential return behaviors as people tend to revisit a few highly frequented places but also revealed detailed characteristics of those activity places. 

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3. Introducing Twitter Daily Estimates of Residents and Non-Residents at the County Level

   https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10060227  

   Martín, Yago; Li, Zhenlong; Ge, Yue; Huang, Xiao (June 2021, Social Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   The study of migrations and mobility has historically been severely limited by the absence of reliable data or the temporal sparsity of available data. Using geospatial digital trace data, the study of population movements can be much more precisely and dynamically measured. Our research seeks to develop a near real-time (one-day lag) Twitter census that gives a more temporally granular picture of local and non-local population at the county level. Internal validation reveals over 80% accuracy when compared with users’ self-reported home location. External validation results suggest these stocks correlate with available statistics of residents/non-residents at the county level and can accurately reflect regular (seasonal tourism) and non-regular events such as the Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017. The findings demonstrate that Twitter holds the potential to introduce the dynamic component often lacking in population estimates. This study could potentially benefit various fields such as demography, tourism, emergency management, and public health and create new opportunities for large-scale mobility analyses. 

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4. Can online self-reports assist in real-time identification of influenza vaccination uptake? A cross-sectional study of influenza vaccine-related tweets in the USA, 2013–2017

   https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-024018  

   Huang, Xiaolei; Smith, Michael C; Jamison, Amelia M; Broniatowski, David A; Dredze, Mark; Quinn, Sandra Crouse; Cai, Justin; Paul, Michael J (January 2019, BMJ Open)

   Introduction The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spend significant time and resources to track influenza vaccination coverage each influenza season using national surveys. Emerging data from social media provide an alternative solution to surveillance at both national and local levels of influenza vaccination coverage in near real time. Objectives This study aimed to characterise and analyse the vaccinated population from temporal, demographical and geographical perspectives using automatic classification of vaccination-related Twitter data. Methods In this cross-sectional study, we continuously collected tweets containing both influenza-related terms and vaccine-related terms covering four consecutive influenza seasons from 2013 to 2017. We created a machine learning classifier to identify relevant tweets, then evaluated the approach by comparing to data from the CDC’s FluVaxView. We limited our analysis to tweets geolocated within the USA. Results We assessed 1 124 839 tweets. We found strong correlations of 0.799 between monthly Twitter estimates and CDC, with correlations as high as 0.950 in individual influenza seasons. We also found that our approach obtained geographical correlations of 0.387 at the US state level and 0.467 at the regional level. Finally, we found a higher level of influenza vaccine tweets among female users than male users, also consistent with the results of CDC surveys on vaccine uptake. Conclusion Significant correlations between Twitter data and CDC data show the potential of using social media for vaccination surveillance. Temporal variability is captured better than geographical and demographical variability. We discuss potential paths forward for leveraging this approach. 

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5. A Twitter Data Credibility Framework—Hurricane Harvey as a Use Case

   https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8030111  

   Yang, Jingchao; Yu, Manzhu; Qin, Han; Lu, Mingyue; Yang, Chaowei (March 2019, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information)

   Social media data have been used to improve geographic situation awareness in the past decade. Although they have free and openly availability advantages, only a small proportion is related to situation awareness, and reliability or trustworthiness is a challenge. A credibility framework is proposed for Twitter data in the context of disaster situation awareness. The framework is derived from crowdsourcing, which states that errors propagated in volunteered information decrease as the number of contributors increases. In the proposed framework, credibility is hierarchically assessed on two tweet levels. The framework was tested using Hurricane Harvey Twitter data, in which situation awareness related tweets were extracted using a set of predefined keywords including power, shelter, damage, casualty, and flood. For each tweet, text messages and associated URLs were integrated to enhance the information completeness. Events were identified by aggregating tweets based on their topics and spatiotemporal characteristics. Credibility for events was calculated and analyzed against the spatial, temporal, and social impacting scales. This framework has the potential to calculate the evolving credibility in real time, providing users insight on the most important and trustworthy events. 

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