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Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and
Emergency Events
Amanda Lee Hughes & Leysia PalenConnectivIT Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
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Overview
• Quantitative & Opportunistic study of Twitter in the late summer of 2008
• Examine use in four mass convergence events– 2 emergency
– 2 non-emergency
• Future research
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• Micro-blogging service• Short messages up to 140 characters • Messages (also known as tweets) can
be sent and retrieved through various means
• Over 3 million user accounts• Nearly 1 million messages sent per day
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Events of Study August and September of 2008
• Democratic National Convention (DNC)– August 25-28, 2008– Denver, Colorado– Estimated attendance of 50,000
• Republican National Convention (RNC)– September 1-4, 2008– Saint Paul, Minnesota– Estimated attendance of 45,000
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Events of Study August and September of 2008
• Hurricane Gustav– August 25-September 4, 2008– US Landfall near Cocodrie, Louisiana on
September 1, 2008– Nearly two million evacuated in the US
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Events of Study August and September of 2008
• Hurricane Ike– September 1-September 14, 2008– US Landfall at Galveston, Texas on
September 13, 2008– Mandatory evacuation of 160,000 in the US
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Event Timeline
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Data Collection
Event Data Collection Timeframe
Search Terms # Tweets
Conventions
DNC 21 Aug 2008 – 28 Aug 2008
Denver, DNC 21,139
RNC 8 Aug 2008 – 4 Sep 2008
RNC, St Paul, Saint Paul
17,588
Hurricanes
Gustav 25 Aug 2008 – 4 Sep 2008
Gustav, hurricane 38,373
Ike 1 Sep 2008 – 14 Sep 2008
Ike, hurricane 59,963
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Data Collection
• General Twitter Sample - to compare against our event specific data– Taken during our entire data collection timeframe,
August 21, 2008 – September 14, 2008.
– Of the approximately 27 million tweets sent during this time frame we randomly sampled 1%
– Tweets from our other data sets were included
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Convention Daily Twitter Activity
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
21-Aug-0822-Aug-0823-Aug-0824-Aug-0825-Aug-0826-Aug-0827-Aug-0828-Aug-08
DNC
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
28-Aug-0829-Aug-0830-Aug-0831-Aug-081-Sep-082-Sep-083-Sep-084-Sep-08
RNC
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Convention Daily Twitter Activity
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
21-Aug-0822-Aug-0823-Aug-0824-Aug-0825-Aug-0826-Aug-0827-Aug-0828-Aug-08
DNC
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
28-Aug-0829-Aug-0830-Aug-0831-Aug-081-Sep-082-Sep-083-Sep-084-Sep-08
RNC
Days of each convention
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Hurricane Daily Twitter Activity
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
25-Aug-0826-Aug-0827-Aug-0828-Aug-0829-Aug-0830-Aug-0831-Aug-081-Sep-082-Sep-083-Sep-084-Sep-08
Gustav
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
1-Sep-082-Sep-083-Sep-084-Sep-085-Sep-086-Sep-087-Sep-088-Sep-089-Sep-0810-Sep-0811-Sep-0812-Sep-0813-Sep-0814-Sep-08
Ike
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Hurricane Daily Twitter Activity
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
25-Aug-0826-Aug-0827-Aug-0828-Aug-0829-Aug-0830-Aug-0831-Aug-081-Sep-082-Sep-083-Sep-084-Sep-08
Gustav
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
# Tweets
1-Sep-082-Sep-083-Sep-084-Sep-085-Sep-086-Sep-087-Sep-088-Sep-089-Sep-0810-Sep-0811-Sep-0812-Sep-0813-Sep-0814-Sep-08
Ike
US Landfall US LandfallCuba Landfall
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Number of Tweets Per User
0.00%
10.00%
20.00%
30.00%
40.00%
50.00%
60.00%
70.00%
80.00%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
DNCRNCGustavIke
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Reply Tweet Example
“@miamiherald what did Gov. Crist say this morning about the Hurricane and Evacs? #Ike”
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Reply Tweets
0
5
10
15
20
25
% ReplyTweets
DNCRNCGustavIkeGeneral
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URL Tweet Examples
“Hurricane Ike hampers relief effort in Haiti - guardian.co.uk
http://tinyurl.com/5qwkjo”
“For latest shelter info: http://www.msema.org/ #gustav”
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URL Tweets
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
% URL Tweets
DNC
RNC
Gustav
Ike
General
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Adoption of Twitter
• Collected information about all the new users in each data set
• Examined how many tweets each new user had sent since the time of the original data collection
• Defined “active users” as those who have contributed one or more tweet every week
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Adoption of Twitter
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
% Active Users
DNCRNCGustavIkeGeneral
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Conclusions
• Twitter supports information broadcasting and brokerage.
• Preliminary evidence that those new Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a non-routine event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.
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Future Research
• This research serves as a baseline.• Twitter activity is changing.• Right now, we are looking at Twitter
activity around the recent Red River floods and Oklahoma fires. – Quantitative– Qualitative
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Future Research
• Look for more to come soon...
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Thank You!
• This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation:
– NSF CAREER Grant IIS-0546315
• For more information about our research in Crisis Informatics:
– http://disaster.cs.colorado.edu/