Abstract
Society’s increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive “digital traces” of our collective human behavior. These new data sources are fuelling the rapid development of the new field of computational social science. To investigate user attention to the Hurricane Sandy disaster in 2012, we analyze data from Flickr, a popular website for sharing personal photographs. In this case study, we find that the number of photos taken and subsequently uploaded to Flickr with titles, descriptions or tags related to Hurricane Sandy bears a striking correlation to the atmospheric pressure in the US state New Jersey during this period. Appropriate leverage of such information could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management.
Highlights
Society’s increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive ‘‘digital traces’’ of our collective human behavior
We find that the number of photos taken and subsequently uploaded to Flickr with titles, descriptions or tags related to Hurricane Sandy bears a striking correlation to the atmospheric pressure in the US state New Jersey during this period
We investigate whether we can identify any relationship between catastrophic events such as natural disasters, and users’ photo sharing activity on Flickr, to provide insight into the dynamics of human attention to such events
Summary
Society’s increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive ‘‘digital traces’’ of our collective human behavior. We find that the number of photos taken and subsequently uploaded to Flickr with titles, descriptions or tags related to Hurricane Sandy bears a striking correlation to the atmospheric pressure in the US state New Jersey during this period. Appropriate leverage of such information could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management. The subject of our case study is Hurricane Sandy—a hurricane that devastated portions of the Caribbean and the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States during late October 2012. ‘‘Sandy’’, classified as the eighteenth named storm and tenth hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on 30 October 201221
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