Can twitter really save your life? A case study of visual social media analytics for situation awareness

Dennis Thom, Robert Kruger, Thomas Ertl, Ulrike Bechstedt, Axel Platz, Julia Zisgen, Bernd Volland

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    Social media monitoring for crisis intelligence is on the brink of commercialization and widespread adoption. To close the gap between research and application, this paper presents results of a broad-scale case study on visual analytics of social media for situation awareness. We asked twenty-nine domain experts from disaster response and critical infrastructure management to investigate various crisis intelligence tasks based on actual Twitter data, which was recorded during the 2013 German Flood. To this end, the ScatterBlogs visual analytics framework, a platform that provides reference implementations of tools and techniques from ongoing research, was given to them as an integrated toolbox. This paper presents and reviews the domain experts' individual performances with the system, their comments about the usefulness and applicability of its capabilities, and the results of a questionnaire each participant had to complete. Based on this evaluation, we will answer the question if and how visual analytics of social media can shape tomorrow's crisis intelligence.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publication2015 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, PacificVis 2015 - Proceedings
    EditorsShixia Liu, Gerik Scheuermann, Shigeo Takahashi
    PublisherIEEE Computer Society
    Pages183-190
    Number of pages8
    ISBN (Electronic)9781467368797
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Jul 14 2015
    Event2015 8th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, PacificVis 2015 - Hangzhou, China
    Duration: Apr 14 2015Apr 17 2015

    Publication series

    NameIEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium
    Volume2015-July
    ISSN (Print)2165-8765
    ISSN (Electronic)2165-8773

    Conference

    Conference2015 8th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, PacificVis 2015
    Country/TerritoryChina
    CityHangzhou
    Period4/14/154/17/15

    Keywords

    • H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Evaluation

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
    • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
    • Hardware and Architecture
    • Software

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