Social media and humanitarian disasters: Typhoon Ruby

During humanitarian crises, social media users around the world post messages, photos and videos to various social media sites. The use of social media as a means for communication and a place to gather data remains an experimental field for humanitarian organizations. However, mainstream media have embraced the phenomenon and routinely feature user-generated content in articles and broadcasts. Given the large volume, velocity and variety of information contained in social media sites, capturing relevant data requires a significant amount of processing. Technologies for processing and aggregating those messages through a mixture of computing algorithms and human annotations have continued to mature in recent years.

Related Subject(s): Développement économique et social