Social networking services like Facebook, Google+ or Twitter allow easy and rapid sharing of information, feelings and observations. During natural disasters, these data can be used to obtain insight into the mood of the population and the extent of damage from the perspective of eye-witnesses.
Method & Data
To get rapid information on what eye-witnesses report from the affected area, we analyze twitter messages related to the typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda which hit the Philippines at Nov. 7, 20:40 UTC. We extract twitter messages, so called tweets, containing one or more specified keywords from the field of “cyclonic storms” and use them for further analysis shown below. For the time frame of Nov. 4 to Nov. 12 we get a database of 36751 localized tweets of which 5159 are located in our area of interest (Philippines). About 939 to 1602 of these tweets have photos attached.
When do people twitter?