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Title: Tipping the scales: how geographical scale affects the interpretation of social media behavior in crisis research
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1837021
PAR ID:
10467704
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Springer Nature
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Natural Hazards
Volume:
112
Issue:
1
ISSN:
0921-030X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
545 to 564
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Crisis response Crisis informatics Social media Vulnerability Hurricanes
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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