Microblogging during the European Floods 2013: What Twitter May Contribute in German Emergencies

Social media is becoming more and more important in crisis management. However its analysis by emergency services still bears unaddressed challenges and the majority of studies focus on the use of social media in the USA. In this paper German tweets of the European Flood 2013 are therefore captured and analyzed using descriptive statistics, qualitative data coding, and computational algorithms. Our work illustrates that this event provided sufficient German traffic and geo-locations as well as enough original data (not derivative). However, up-to-date Named Entity Recognizer (NER) with German classifier could not recognize German rivers and highways satisfactorily. Furthermore our analysis revealed pragmatic (linguistic) barriers resulting from irony, wordplay, and ambiguity, as well as in retweet-behavior. To ease the analysis of data we suggest a retweet ratio, which is illustrated to be higher with important tweets and may help selecting tweets for mining. We argue that existing software has to be adapted and improved for German language characteristics, also to detect markedness, seriousness and trut

The Self-Organization of Digital Volunteers across Social Media: The Case of the 2013 European Floods in Germany

For almost 15 years, social media have been regularly used during emergencies. One of the most recent, and instructive, examples of its widespread use during a large scale scenario in Europe were the 2013 European floods. Public reporting during the event indicated, and our analysis confirms, that Twitter, Facebook (FB), Google Maps and other services were frequently used by affected citizen and volunteers to coordinate help activities among themselves. We conducted a qualitative analysis of selected emergent volunteer communities in Germany on FB and Twitter among others, and subsequently conducted interviews with FB group founders and activists. Our aim was to analyze the use of social media during this particular event, especially by digital volunteers. Our study illustrates the relevance of social media for German citizens in cases of disaster, focusing especially on the role of the moderator. Our specific emphasis was the embedding of social media in the organizing work done by said volunteers, emphasizing both the patterns of social media use and the challenges that result. We show that different social media were used in different ways: Twitter was used in the main for status updates while FB-pages were mostly intended to provide an overview. FB-groups also coordinated a multitude of activities

112.social: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizens

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app

The role of social media for collective behaviour development in response to natural disasters

With the emergence of social media, user-generated content from people affected by disasters has gained significant importance. Thus far, research has focused on identifying categories and taxonomies of the types of information being shared among users during times of disasters. However, there is a lack of theorizing with the dynamics of and relationships between the identified concepts. In our current research, we applied probabilistic topic modelling approach to identify topics from Chennai disaster Twitter data. We manually interpreted and further clustered the topics into generic categories and themes, and traced their development over the days of the disaster. Finally, we build a process model to explore an emerging phenomenon on social media during a disaster. We argue that the conditions/activities such as collective awareness, collective concern, collective empathy and support are necessary conditions for people to feel, respond, and act as forms of collective behaviour

The Adoption of social media analytics for crisis management – Challenges and Opportunities

We live in a time when anyone can change from a passive bystander to an active communicator during a crisis. This makes user-generated content a potentially valuable source of information for emergency management agencies. However, at present, agencies still hesitate to use social media during crises. This research seeks to identify the challenges emergency management agencies face in using social media analytics within their organisations. We conducted a systematic literature review and interviewed ten emergency management professionals across six expert interview sessions. Afterwards, we used the Technology-Organization-Environment Framework to conceptualise our findings. Our study reveals fruitful opportunities for the continuous collaboration of both information systems research and emergency management agencies. Accordingly, information systems research can support emergency management agencies in using social media data for efficient crisis management by enhancing awareness of the benefits of social media analytics and helping to overcome organisational and technological challenges

112.SOCIAL: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizen

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app

Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Informatics: User Expectations and Design Implications for Social Media and Mobile Apps in Crises

In the past 20 years, mobile technologies and social media have not only been established in everyday life, but also in crises, disasters, and emergencies. Especially large-scale events, such as 2012 Hurricane Sandy or the 2013 European Floods, showed that citizens are not passive victims but active participants utilizing mobile and social information and communication technologies (ICT) for crisis response (Reuter, Hughes, et al., 2018). Accordingly, the research field of crisis informatics emerged as a multidisciplinary field which combines computing and social science knowledge of disasters and is rooted in disciplines such as human-computer interaction (HCI), computer science (CS), computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and information systems (IS). While citizens use personal ICT to respond to a disaster to cope with uncertainty, emergency services such as fire and police departments started using available online data to increase situational awareness and improve decision making for a better crisis response (Palen & Anderson, 2016). When looking at even larger crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes apparent the challenges of crisis informatics are amplified (Xie et al., 2020). Notably, information is often not available in perfect shape to assist crisis response: the dissemination of high-volume, heterogeneous and highly semantic data by citizens, often referred to as big social data (Olshannikova et al., 2017), poses challenges for emergency services in terms of access, quality and quantity of information. In order to achieve situational awareness or even actionable information, meaning the right information for the right person at the right time (Zade et al., 2018), information must be refined according to event-based factors, organizational requirements, societal boundary conditions and technical feasibility. In order to research the topic of information refinement, this dissertation combines the methodological framework of design case studies (Wulf et al., 2011) with principles of design science research (Hevner et al., 2004). These extended design case studies consist of four phases, each contributing to research with distinct results. This thesis first reviews existing research on use, role, and perception patterns in crisis informatics, emphasizing the increasing potentials of public participation in crisis response using social media. Then, empirical studies conducted with the German population reveal positive attitudes and increasing use of mobile and social technologies during crises, but also highlight barriers of use and expectations towards emergency services to monitor and interact in media. The findings led to the design of innovative ICT artefacts, including visual guidelines for citizens’ use of social media in emergencies (SMG), an emergency service web interface for aggregating mobile and social data (ESI), an efficient algorithm for detecting relevant information in social media (SMO), and a mobile app for bidirectional communication between emergency services and citizens (112.social). The evaluation of artefacts involved the participation of end-users in the application field of crisis management, pointing out potentials for future improvements and research potentials. The thesis concludes with a framework on information refinement for crisis informatics, integrating event-based, organizational, societal, and technological perspectives

Twitter location (sometimes) matters: Exploring the relationship between georeferenced tweet content and nearby feature classes

In this paper, we investigate whether microblogging texts (tweets) produced on mobile devices are related to the geographical locations where they were posted. For this purpose, we correlate tweet topics to areas. In doing so, classified points of interest from OpenStreetMap serve as validation points. We adopted the classification and geolocation of these points to correlate with tweet content by means of manual, supervised, and unsupervised machine learning approaches. Evaluation showed the manual classification approach to be highest quality, followed by the supervised method, and that the unsupervised classification was of low quality. We found that the degree to which tweet content is related to nearby points of interest depends upon topic (that is, upon the OpenStreetMap category). A more general synthesis with prior research leads to the conclusion that the strength of the relationship of tweets and their geographic origin also depends upon geographic scale (where smaller scale correlations are more significant than those of larger scale)