Social Media Analysis for Crisis Management: A Brief Survey

Daniela Pohl, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt

Abstract
Social media is getting increasingly important during a crisis, especially due to the widespread usage of mobile devices (e.g., phones). People can document whenever and whatever they want in several modes (i.e., pictures, videos and/or text). Social media gives an opportunity to communicate the current situation to other (affected) people or to emergency agencies although mobile phone or emergency lines may be overloaded. In the last years, studies were conducted focusing on different aspects of social media in crisis management underlining its continuously increasing importance in this area. Also, systems, tools and algorithms performing social media analysis have been developed and implemented to automatize monitoring, classification or aggregation tasks. This contribution summarizes important research work (i.e., work not already covered within a separate contribution in this E-Letter) using social media (analysis) in the context of crisis management. It gives an overview on existing case studies and analysis frameworks developed to support emergency agencies in several crisis management activities. This work should be seen as a starting point for people interested in this topic or coming from similar research areas to gain an overview on social media analysis in crisis management.

Full paper

IEEE STCSN E-Letter, Vol. 2, No. 1.