Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr

Abstract

Society's increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive ''digital traces'' of our collective human behavior. These new data sources are fuelling the rapid development of the new field of computational social science. To investigate user attention to the Hurricane Sandy disaster in 2012, we analyze data from Flickr, a popular website for sharing personal photographs. In this case study, we find that the number of photos taken and subsequently uploaded to Flickr with titles, descriptions or tags related to Hurricane Sandy bears a striking correlation to the atmospheric pressure in the US state New Jersey during this period. Appropriate leverage of such information could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management.S teadily increasing quantities of data are being generated through society's interactions with technology, automatically documenting human actions in a previously unimaginable fashion [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Analysis of such ''big data'' is opening up new windows for a more precise quantification of real world social phenomena. A particularly fruitful area of research has focused on the analysis of Internet user search queries, as logged by search engines such as Google. Strong links have been found between changes in the information users are seeking online and events in the real world, ranging from reports of flu infections across the USA 11 to trading volume in the US stock markets 12 . A recent study has also shown that Internet users from countries with a higher per capita GDP are significantly more likely to search for information about years in the future than years in the past 13 . Preis, Moat and Stanley have demonstrated that changes in the number of searches for financially related terms on Google may have contained early warning signs of stock market moves 14 . Moat et al. presented evidence that increases in the number of views of financially related pages on Wikipedia could be detected before stock market falls 15 .Collective human attention to topics can be measured by various indices into online information flow. While analysis of search volume provides insight into the information that people are seeking, there are other data sources which one can analyze to gain insight into information that people are distributing. This information can take various forms, from text to multimedia, such as photos and videos.In this case study, we analyze the usage of a prominent photo sharing website, Flickr 16-20 . We investigate whether we can identify any relationship between catastrophic events such as natural disasters, and users' photo sharing activity on Flickr, to provide insight into the dynamics of human attention to such events.

Outperforming the benchmark: online information demand and REIT market performance

“…Moat et al, 2013;Bordino et al, 2012;Gilbert and Karahalios, 2010;Mao et al, 2011;Bollen et al, 2011;Preis et al, 2013b). As this extensive data set reflects in an unparalleled manner the everyday activities of an increasingly complex society, it enables researchers to make very prompt and well educated guesses from online search activities about the future behavior of users.…”

Current Efforts for Prediction and Assessment of Natural Disasters: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Volcanic eruptions, Hurricanes, Tornados, and Floods

“…Preis et al [234] discussed the real-time quantication of the digital traces of Hurricane Sandy using use of a photo sharing website, Flickr. Shelton at al.…”

From human mobility to renewable energies

“…These models allow notably for the description of failure avalanches [13]. An interesting example of the information exchange between different world-wide multiscale systems is the predictive character of human internet searches on stock market trades [14]. Even when considering only small samples of data sets representing connected agents, analyzing the correlations between them quickly leads to complex problems [15,16].…”