Well – what a few weeks it’s been. Following the Eidos symposium in Brisbane and the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra, there’s been plenty of media coverage of our research into the role of social media during the Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake. There will be more articles and conference presentations emerging …
Continue reading “Our Social Media and Crisis Communication Research in the Media”
Hot on the heels of last week’s very successful Eidos Institute symposium on Social Media in Times of Crisis, in Brisbane, comes the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra; I’m flying down tomorrow to present an overview of our analysis of the Queensland floods (#qldfloods) and Christchurch earthquake (#eqnz) on Twitter. Looking forward …
Continue reading “Emergency Media and Public Affairs Conference”
Working through our available data on Twitter use during crisis events ahead of the Eidos Institute symposium on Monday, I started thinking about some of the broader patterns we are seeing. Very obviously, a good bit of the #hashtag activity around acute events is taken up with retweeting information – both simply passing it along …
Continue reading “Broader Twitter Patterns during Acute Events”
As we’ve mentioned in a previous post, Jean and I participated in the Eidos Institute symposium “Social Media in Times of Crisis” at the State Library of Queensland today – which turned out to be a great event that generated lots of new ideas and further possibilities for our research. Many thanks to all of …
A quick heads-up for our Australian-based readers: our work on researching social media use during the Queensland floods will be featured at a symposium in Brisbane on 4 April 2011, organised by the Eidos Institute. In addition to Jean, myself, and other colleagues from QUT and USQ, key presenters from emergency authorities and the mainstream …
The German online magazine Politik-Digital, which covers issues relating to politics and the Internet, has just published a lengthy interview with me about the role of Twitter and other social media platforms during recent disasters, and about what German authorities may learn from recent experiences elsewhere – from the Queensland floods to the Christchurch earthquake …
Continue reading “Social Media and Emergencies, in German(y)”
We’ve spent the last couple of posts looking at user activity patterns on Twitter during the days following the Christchurch earthquake. Now it’s time to shift our attention to the themes discussed by the #eqnz hashtag community – again with particular attention also to how these themes change over time. What I’ve done here is …
Continue reading “Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 3”
Following on from my overview of key tweeting patterns in the Christchurch earthquake in February, in the previous post, I wanted to further explore Alfred Hermida’s idea of Twitter as ‘ambient journalism‘ – or more to the point, examine whether there are any obvious differences between Twitter’s coverage of the immediate earthquake and its long-term …
Continue reading “Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 2”
Given the recent focus on this blog on the use of social media during major disasters, a closer look at the use of Twitter during the devastating Christchurch earthquake on 22 Feb. 2011 is long overdue (and sadly, more on the horrible Japanese earthquake and tsunami will follow soon, too). I’m following our previous methodology …
Continue reading “Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 1”
In a previous post, I explained how to extract links to known image-hosting services from an archive of tweets, and promised to follow up with a substantial post on image-sharing in the Queensland Floods – this is that post. It’s pretty long, but it does have pictures. Here are the main points: During the Queensland …