Continuing the catch-up with recent publications and presentations, I also wanted to share the paper which Jean Burgess and I presented at the Australia New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management conference in Brisbane last week. The paper (slides and audio are below) constitutes our most comprehensive analysis to date of the use of Twitter in the 2010/11 Christchurch earthquakes – focussing especially on the most damaging event on 22 February 2011.
In particular, we examine the evolution of the Twitter user community and its activities over time – both in the short term over the fortnight following the February quake, and in the longer term through a comparison of the four major tremors between September 2010 and December 2011. These repeated events provide us with a useful indication of how Twitter use changes and evolves from one crisis to the next, building on the experience of its users in earlier events – but we do hope that there will be no further major earthquakes in Christchurch which add to this dataset…
In addition to the presentation itself, a full peer-reviewed paper will also be published as part of the ANZDMC proceedings – we’ll add it to this post and list it on our publications page once it’s available.