The “Truth” About Hurricane Sandy
John A. Knox, Professor of Geography, University of Georgia speaks on the matter:
Our work at the University of Georgia on using social media data to analyze extreme weather events has lead us to look at, using the example of Hurricane Sandy, and the thousands and thousands of tweets during Hurricane Sandy, up to 20 million tweets were done, and we were interested in how information was transmitted in that more compressed way and rippled out perhaps from areas affected to places around the globe.
To understand how the public perceives, misperceives, and reconceives an extreme weather event, we acquired a database of tweets based on hashtag, or keywords actually – “Sandy” or “superstorm” – and we looked at geotag tweets because we wanted to know where in place people were.
What we found in the latter part of our research when we dug deeply into these 185,000 tweets, is that there are a lot of misconceptions in the public. People didn’t understand that Hurricane Sandy, which was the second largest hurricane in terms of special extent on record.
They kept on thinking that it was something that made a landfall or touchdown like a tornado and then went away.
Twitter is not simply a place where you dump information, it’s a community of its own that if something takes off, it becomes viral, we add that phrase, and then can become as big a story as the story itself.
The naming of a storm for example, what you would think of a fairly benign thing, we name hurricanes so we can kind of identify them and relate to them. Well, that’s what the public does, except that in Sandy it went a step further to where on Twitter, Sandy became its own persona that had few of the characteristics of the real storm, and more of a woman with a vendetta against the Northeast, basically.
We looked at keywords that suggested some kind of scientific content. It turned out that for every one tweet that we looked at in the geotag dataset, that had that, that there would be ten or maybe even a hundred that would have keywords that related to the fictitious persona of Sandy. And we’re thinking about, what does this mean for communicating risk, communicating science in an age where you can put one thing out and it can be high jacked.
And you worry that people are essentially being distracted from the main storyline.
So, maybe what that will do is then feed back to the information providers, us, the meteorologists, how we provide information that will be assimilated by the public in a more optimal way. A conduit for more effective information transmission to the public so they can make better decisions.
