Twitter use during an emergency event: the case of the UT Austin shooting

This poster presents one of our efforts in the context of the Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery Network (CTRnet) project. One topic studied in this project is the use of social media by government to respond to emergency events in towns and counties. Monitoring social media information for unusual behavior can help identify these events once we can characterize their patterns. As an example, we analyzed the campus shooting in the University of Texas, Austin, on September 28, 2010. In order to study the pattern of communication and the information communicated using social media on that day, we collected publicly available data from Twitter. Collected tweets were analyzed and visualized using the Natural Language Toolkit, word clouds, and graphs. They showed how news and posts related to this event swamped the discussions of other issues.