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Author: search.filters.author.Goonetilleke, AshanthaSubject: search.filters.subject.Data analytics

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    Determining disaster severity through social media analysis: testing the methodology with South East Queensland Flood tweets
    (Elsevier, 2020-01) Goonetilleke, Ashantha
    Social media was underutilised in disaster management practices, as it was not seen as a real-time ground level information harvesting tool during a disaster. In recent years, with the increasing popularity and use of social media, people have started to express their views, experiences, images, and video evidences through different social media platforms. Consequently, harnessing such crowdsourced information has become an opportunity for authorities to obtain enhanced situation awareness data for efficient disaster management practices. Nonetheless, the current disaster-related Twitter analytics methods are not versatile enough to define disaster impacts levels as interpreted by the local communities. This paper contributes to the existing knowledge by applying and extending a well-established data analysis framework, and identifying highly impacted disaster areas as perceived by the local communities. For this, the study used real-time Twitter data posted during the 2010–2011 South East Queensland Floods. The findings reveal that: (a) Utilising Twitter is a promising approach to reflect citizen knowledge; (b) Tweets could be used to identify the fluctuations of disaster severity over time; (c) The spatial analysis of tweets validates the applicability of geo-located messages to demarcate highly impacted disaster zones.
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    How engaging are disaster management related social media channels? the case of Australian state emergency organisations
    (Elsevier, 2020-09) Goonetilleke, Ashantha
    Social media is increasingly becoming a formal tool of communication across the world. For example, state emergency organisations maintain social media channels to share information with millions of people. While community engagement through social media has become a trend across the world, measuring community engagement levels of such social media channels is a highly time demanding, and also an understudied, but important, area of research. This paper, through an empirical investigation, addresses the question of how engaging disaster management related social media channels are. The study adopted five indices—i.e., popularity, commitment, virality, engagement, and utilisation—in order to evaluate the levels of community engagement by various social media channels. As the case study, official Facebook and Twitter pages maintained by the state emergency organisations of three Australian states, namely New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, were scrutinised. The results revealed that: (a) Social media acts as a promising vehicle to capture dispersed community knowledge on disaster management, but it still needs more utilisation; (b) Publishing social media posts with images and animated maps increases community engagement levels, and; (c) Social media posts, with an aim to increase the situation awareness, receive higher community attention than the other posts.