Visualizing Social Media

Overview

The emergence of online social media has provided a new outlet for individuals to develop greater cohesion when mitigating, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from large-scale disasters. Yet, the promise of social media to address social disparities and mediate population vulnerabilities has been largely unfulfilled. The goal of this ASPR-funded project is to improve the disaster response capabilities of health departments and other agencies by increasing the use of social media data for research and communication.

Social Media Training Suite

  • Flagship On-line Course: COM3305 – Social Media in Preparedness and Response
  • Thought Leadership Video Series: The Power of Connectivity + Disaster Operations
  • Concepts of Social Media in Disaster Video Series: Managing & Organizing Crowd-sourced Content
  • Social Media Resources: Peer-reviewed articles, reports/white papers, tools

Project Objectives

  1. NCDP is developing a collaborative geospatial query tool via the Geofeedia.com platform that is enabling Hurricane Sandy grantees to download, analyze, and share thousands of location-based social media data records from the storm and other past disasters.
  2. NCDP is developing a web portal to provide social media training and data resources to facilitate collaboration among the research grantees, public health agencies, first responder organizations, and the communities they serve.

Project Goals

  • Provide access to Geofeedia, a geospatial query tool for the research grantees that creates location-based social media data sets from past events.
  • Develop a web portal to host a suite of training resources, online tools, and online databases to facilitate collaborative research and response efforts involving social media data.
  • Integrate research tools for using social media data developed by New York regional agencies and tech startups.
  • Develop an online library of peer reviewed literature sources pertaining to the visualization of social media data during disaster response.
  • Develop a library of online data resources for analyses of social media data.
  • Develop training videos on using social media data for research purposes.
  • Develop an NCDP online course on using social media during disaster response.

Personnel Involved in the Study: