Using Social Media to Anticipate Human Mobility and Resilience During Disasters
The analysis of cell phone data can already be used to predict mobility patterns after major natural disasters. Now, a new peer-reviewed scientific study suggests that travel patterns may also be predictable using tweets generated following large disasters. In “Quantifying Human Mobility Perturbation and Resilience in Hurricane Sandy,” co-authors Qi Wang and John Taylor analyze some 700,000 geo-tagged tweets posted by ~53,000 individuals as they moved around over the course of 12 days. Results of the analysis confirm that “Sandy did impact the mobility patterns of individuals in New York City,” but this “perturbation was surprisingly brief and the mobility patterns encouragingly resilient. This resilience occurred even in the large-scale absence of mobility infrastructure.”
