Semiautomated social media analytics for sensing societal impacts due to community disruptions during disasters

Abstract

AbstractUnderstanding the societal impacts caused by community disruptions (e.g., power outages and road closures), particularly during the response stage, with timeliness and sufficient detail is an underexplored, yet important, consideration. It is critical for effective decision‐making and coordination in disaster response and relief activities as well as post‐disaster virtual reconnaissance activities. This study proposes a semiautomated social media analytics approach for social sensing of Disaster Impacts and Societal Considerations (SocialDISC). This approach addresses two limitations of existing social media analytics approaches: lacking adaptability to the need of different analyzers or different disasters and missing the information related to subjective feelings, emotions, and opinions of the people. SocialDISC labels and clusters social media posts in each disruption category to facilitate scanning by analyzers. Analyzers, in this paper, are persons who acquire social impact information from social media data (e.g., infrastructure management personnel, volunteers, researchers from academia, and some residents impacted by the disaster). Furthermore, SocialDISC enables analyzers to quickly parse topics and emotion signals of each subevent to assess the societal impacts caused by disruption events. To demonstrate the performance of SocialDISC, the authors proposed a case study based on Hurricane Harvey, one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history, and analyzed the disruptions and corresponding societal impacts in different aspects. The analysis result shows that Houstonians suffered greatly from flooded houses, lack of access to food and water, and power outages. SocialDISC can foster an understanding of the relationship between disruptions of infrastructures and societal impacts, expectations of the public when facing disasters, and infrastructure interdependency and cascading failures. SocialDISC's provision of timely information about the societal impacts of people may help disaster response decision‐making.