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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 disaster response capabilities of health departments and other agencies by increasing the use of social media data for research and communication.

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Social Media Training Suite:

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:

  • geofeedia-sandy-aProvide 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.

Supported by ASPR Grant: 1HITEP140023-01-00