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Twitter Floods when it Rains: A Case Study of the UK Floods in early 2014

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Twitter is one of the most prominent social media platforms nowadays. A primary reason that has brought the medium at the spotlight of academic attention is its real-time nature, with people constantly uploading information regarding their surroundings. This trait, coupled with the service's data access policy for researchers and developers, has allowed the community to explore Twitter's potential as a news reporting tool. Finding out promptly about newsworthy events can prove extremely useful in crisis management situations. In this paper, we explore the use of Twitter as a mechanism used in disaster relief, and consequently in public safety. In particular, we perform a case study on the floods that occurred in the United Kingdom during January 2014, and how these were reflected on Twitter, according to tweets (i.e., posts) submitted by the users. We present a systematic algorithmic analysis of tweets collected with respect to our use case scenario, supplemented by visual analytic tools. Our objective is to identify meaningful and effective ways to take advantage of the wealth of Twitter data in crisis management, and we report on the findings of our analysis.

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  1. Twitter Floods when it Rains: A Case Study of the UK Floods in early 2014

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '15 Companion: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
    May 2015
    1602 pages
    ISBN:9781450334730
    DOI:10.1145/2740908

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    • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 May 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. event detection
    2. floods
    3. live web
    4. microblogs
    5. visualization

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    • Research-article

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    • EU funded project INSIGHT

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    • (2021)Disaster impacts analysis using social media data2021 International Conference on Maintenance and Intelligent Asset Management (ICMIAM)10.1109/ICMIAM54662.2021.9715186(1-6)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2021
    • (2021)A multi-perspective approach for analyzing long-running live events on social media. A case study on the “Big Four” international fashion weeksOnline Social Networks and Media10.1016/j.osnem.2021.10014024(100140)Online publication date: Jul-2021
    • (2021)News Monitor: A Framework for Querying News in Real TimeAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_62(543-548)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2021
    • (2019)Enhanced Event Detection in Twitter Through Feature AnalysisInternational Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering10.4018/IJITWE.201907010114:3(1-15)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Improving the reproducibility of geospatial scientific workflows: the use of geosocial media in facilitating disaster responseJournal of Spatial Science10.1080/14498596.2019.1654944(1-18)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2019
    • (2018)Detection and Delineation of Events and Sub-Events in Social Networks2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE.2018.00147(1348-1351)Online publication date: Apr-2018
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    • (2018)Twitter sentiments related to natural calamitiesThe Electronic Library10.1108/EL-12-2015-024436:1(38-54)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2018
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