V14 N2 Paper 7
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Fall 2020

Text Analytics and Spatial Visualization of Social Media Data aDuring a Disaster LifeCycle: The Case of Hurricane Dorian  

Cyrus Goudarzi

Committee

Minoo Modaresnezhad (chair)
Sudip Mittal
Jeffrey Cummings

Abstract

Social media platforms have become an increasingly prevalent means of human communication ever since they grew in popularity across the world. As a result, data scientists have more text data available than ever before. This abundance of data is advancing the field of text data analysis and natural language processing by allowing data scientists to evaluate larger data sets within a specific context. One specific context that has not been as explored is the evaluation of text data generated during a natural disaster. This study’s contributions to previous studies within the disaster context include an exploration of metadata extraction of Twitter user data, an evaluation of current geographic information systems technologies, and a dashboard design for monitoring Twitter activity throughout the disaster lifecycle. This dashboard concept uses visualizations of text data analysis techniques in contrast to each other for the overall purpose of disaster monitoring. The focus of this project is to analyze a dataset of tweets collected before and during Hurricane Dorian using the hashtag “#HurricaneDorian.” The goal of this research is to provide a dashboard concept for disaster management through text mining and spatial analysis techniques using Twitter data. This research also seeks to provide a thorough analysis and summary of text data collected surrounding Hurricane Dorian. Specifically, this research aims to answer the following research questions: How can social media (Twitter) be utilized to identify, process, and comprehend critical elements of an incident or situation during a natural disaster? How does the analysis of geotagged data compare and contrast to the analysis of non-geotagged data within the disaster context?

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Recommended Citation: Goudarzi, C., Modaresnezhad, M, Mittal, S., Cummings, J. (2020) Text Analytics and Spatial Visualization of Social Media Data aDuring a Disaster LifeCycle: The Case of Hurricane Dorian. Annals of the Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington, 14(2) paper 7. http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/mscsis/full.aspx.

V14 N2 Paper 7
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Fall 2020