Big Crisis Data
Social Media in Disasters and Time-Critical Situations

Social media is invaluable during crises like natural disasters, but difficult to analyze. This book shows how computer science can help.

Carlos Castillo (Author)

9781107135765, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2016

224 pages, 10 b/w illus. 6 tables
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.44 kg

'Social media has played an indispensable role during all of the recent disasters and crises. If you are a researcher looking for ways to make sense of the data that inundates us during such events or a practitioner struggling to make such data actionable, this book needs to be your first source. Castillo has masterfully synthesized a large number of techniques and capabilities in a unified framework to cover this already broad field for the reader.' Amit Sheth, Executive Director of Kno.e.sis, Wright State University, Ohio

Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages that exceeds the human capacity to process. Emergency managers, decision makers, and affected communities can make sense of social media through a combination of machine computation and human compassion - expressed by thousands of digital volunteers who publish, process, and summarize potentially life-saving information. This book brings together computational methods from many disciplines: natural language processing, semantic technologies, data mining, machine learning, network analysis, human-computer interaction, and information visualization, focusing on methods that are commonly used for processing social media messages under time-critical constraints, and offering more than 500 references to in-depth information.

1. Introduction
2. Volume: data acquisition, storage, and retrieval
3. Vagueness: natural language and semantics
4. Variety: classification and clustering
5. Virality: networks and information propagation
6. Velocity: online methods and data streams
7. Volunteers: humanitarian crowdsourcing
8. Veracity: misinformation and credibility
9. Validity: biases and pitfalls of social media data
10. Visualization: crisis maps and beyond
11. Values: privacy and ethics
12. Conclusions and outlook.

Subject Areas: Computer science [UY], Ethical & social aspects of IT [UBJ]