Social Media and Disasters: the Case of Hurricane Sandy and Twitter Dhiraj Murthy CAMRI Seminar University of Westminster Wed, Nov 12, 14:00 Harrow Campus Room A7.1 http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/social-media-and-disast... Registration is possible per e-mail to christian.fuchs@uti.at, at latest until Nov 10 Sociological understandings of social media and disasters remain an emergent field. Despite major disasters in which victims and others have engaged over social media, we have limited understandings of the function of social media during disasters as well as the ad-hoc communities formed. This presentation seeks to extend current scholarship on Twitter use during natural disasters through the exploration of tweets related to Hurricane Sandy. The storm caused over $65 billion in damage, making it the second costliest storm in U.S. history. We examine the behaviour of Twitter users over from October 22, 2012 to November 3, 2012, using mentions, links and hashtags for data analysis. All tweets relating to the storm during this period were collected. Certain Twitter functionalities rose to prominence depending on the stage of the storm. For instance, in the days following Hurricane Sandy’s initial landfall, users became more interested in relief efforts. The conclusion is that behaviour in an anticipated natural disaster can be distilled into a framework of micro-events that take place within the larger context of the disaster and can be studied using comparative temporal methods. Dhiraj Murthy is a Senior Lecturer of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His current research explores social media, virtual organizations, and big data quantitative analysis. His work on social networking technologies in virtual breeding grounds was funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of CyberInfrastructure. Dhiraj also has a book about Twitter published by Polity Press. He founded and directed the Social Network Innovation Lab, an interdisciplinary research group investigating social networks and virtual organizations.