By Dr Tomas Holderness & Dr Etienne Turpin
The early June release of the PetaJakarta.org White Paper marked the end of the first phase of the ground breaking research program. Continue reading
By Associate Professor Rodney Clarke
All major approaches used to analyse tweets (statistical and machine learning) proceed from the segmentation and classification of lexical items (words). An alternative approach involving computer-based grammars is rarely used because they do not scale well to the dimensions necessary for the analysis of PetaJakarta tweet traffic. All current approaches are syntactic and asemantic. They are incapable of addressing questions concerning how citizens are actually using social media platforms during emergencies because they are incapable of explaining how language is structured for use. Continue reading
By Associate Professor Rodney Clarke
The usual approaches to analysing the content of Tweets involve, for example, statistics, as well as techniques from the artificial intelligence community, specifically text mining and machine learning. Statistical approaches generally involve the analysis of word frequencies and the use of visualisation aides like tag clouds to indicate which key words are significant. Often these techniques are used in combination to examine the occurrence and collocation of key words associated with flooding. Continue reading
By Associate Professor Rodney Clarke
One of the problems of using social media during emergencies is being able to assess the various kinds of information that can be in them. Continue reading
By Associate Professor Rodney Clarke
Social media platforms are proliferating globally both in terms of the number of platforms and also the intensity of their use. Some countries use Twitter as a valid source of emergency information and incorporate it as one of the primary sources of emergency intelligence. Continue reading
This post was originally published by India Lloyd at the Global Challenges blog.
PetaJakarta, shown on the computer screen, provides real-time mapping of flooding throughout Jakarta. Photo credit: Etienne Turpin
We are inundated with information every day. The ubiquity of social media and the 24-hour news cycle means we are faced with more data than we know what to do with.
But can we harness this data overload in times of disaster? How can we break through the plethora of information to navigate our present and create resilience for the future? How can big data become a force for good, rather than a necessary evil of modern life?
These questions were at the heart of last week’s SMART Data Workshop at Sydney Business School. Continue reading