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"Our Grief is Unspeakable'': Automatically Measuring the Community Impact of a Tragedy
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In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media; Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media ; 2334-0770 ; 2162-3449 (2014)
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Abstract:
Social media offer a real-time, unfiltered view of how disasters affect communities. Crisis response, disaster mental health, and — more broadly — public health can benefit from automated analysis of the public’s mental state as exhibited on social media. Our focus is on Twitter data from a community that lost members in a mass shooting and another community—geographically removed from the shooting — that was indirectly exposed. We show that a common approach for understanding emotional response in text: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) can be substantially improved using machine learning. Starting with tweets flagged by LIWC as containing content related to the issue of death, we devise a categorization scheme for death-related tweets to induce automatic text classification of such content. This improved methodology reveals striking differences in the magnitude and duration of increases in death-related talk between these communities. It also detects subtle shifts in the nature of death-related talk. Our results offer lessons for gauging public response and for developing interventions in the wake of a tragedy.
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Keyword:
social media; traumatic events; Twitter
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URL: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14535
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