TY - GEN
T1 - Hyperlocal Toponym usage in storm-related social media
AU - Grace, Rob
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Crisis responders need to locate events reported in social media messages that typically lack geographic metadata such as geotags. Toponyms, places names referenced in messages, provide another source of geographic information, however, the availability and granularity of toponyms in crisis social media remain poorly understood. This study examines toponym usage and granularity across six categories of crisis-related information posted on Twitter during a severe storm. Findings show users often include geographic information in messages describing local and remote storm events but do so rarely when discussing other topics, more often use toponyms than geotags when describing local events, and tend to include fine-grained toponyms in reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption and course-grained toponyms in other kinds of storm-related messages. These findings present requirements for hyperlocal geoparsing techniques and suggest that social media monitoring presents more immediate affordances for course-grained damage assessment than fine-grained situational awareness during a crisis.
AB - Crisis responders need to locate events reported in social media messages that typically lack geographic metadata such as geotags. Toponyms, places names referenced in messages, provide another source of geographic information, however, the availability and granularity of toponyms in crisis social media remain poorly understood. This study examines toponym usage and granularity across six categories of crisis-related information posted on Twitter during a severe storm. Findings show users often include geographic information in messages describing local and remote storm events but do so rarely when discussing other topics, more often use toponyms than geotags when describing local events, and tend to include fine-grained toponyms in reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption and course-grained toponyms in other kinds of storm-related messages. These findings present requirements for hyperlocal geoparsing techniques and suggest that social media monitoring presents more immediate affordances for course-grained damage assessment than fine-grained situational awareness during a crisis.
KW - Crisis Informatics
KW - Emergency Management
KW - Information Behavior
KW - Twitter
KW - Volunteered Geographic Information
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103505722&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85103505722
T3 - Proceedings of the International ISCRAM Conference
SP - 849
EP - 859
BT - ISCRAM 2020 - Proceedings
A2 - Hughes, Amanda Lee
A2 - McNeill, Fiona
A2 - Zobel, Christopher W.
PB - Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM
T2 - 17th Annual International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2020
Y2 - 23 May 2021
ER -