FURI | Fall 2018

Disaster Visualization and Tracking Using Social Media Data

As social media use becomes more prevalent in modern society, it can play a critical role in monitoring the effects of natural disasters. Many victims and relief organizations use Twitter to communicate about hazards, missing persons, and requests for vital supplies since critical infrastructure is damaged and cellular networks are interrupted during a crisis. Therefore, the goal of this project is to utilize DMML’s tweet-tracking system to extract and visualize patterns from tweets related to hurricane activity. These patterns include overall user activity, variation throughout impacted areas, populous locations, and extracting keywords aimed towards increasing the efficiency of disaster-relief efforts.