Collaborative social media analysis for disaster response
During large-scale complex crises such as the Haiti earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Arab Spring, social media has emerged as a source of timely and detailed reports regarding important events. However, individual disaster responders, government officials or citizens who wish to access this vast knowledge base are met with a torrent of information that quickly results in information overload. Without a way to organize and navigate the reports, important details are easily overlooked and it is challenging to use the data to get an overview of the situation as a whole.
We (researchers at Madeira University, University of Oulu and IBM Research) believe that volunteers around the world would be willing to assist hard-pressed decision makers with information management, if the tools were available. With this vision in mind, we have developed CrisisTracker.
CrisisTracker automatically collects millions of daily reports from Twitter and uses text processing and crowdsourcing to organize them around the 4Ws (who, where, what, when).
For further information about CrisisTracker or the study, please contact PhD candidate Jakob Rogstadius at jakob@m-iti.org.
Upcoming field trial
Are you a professional intelligence analyst or decision maker in a disaster response organization, or a journalist trying to piece together scattered reports emerging from complex crises? Do you want to help test if clustered and crowd-curated reports from social media can support your work?
We are looking for professional participants for an upcoming field trial where CrisisTracker will be used to track the Syrian Civil War. The duration of the study is September 7-14, during which volunteers from the Stand-By Task force (and others) will be working in the system to organize data.
Registration
Please indicate below if and how you are willing to participate. You can at any time withdraw from participation and your contact information will never be used beyond the scope of this study.