Use trend analysis of twitter after the great east japan earthquake

After the Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan 2011, numerous tweets were exchanged on Twitter. Several studies have already pointed out that micro-blogging systems have shown potential advantages in emergency situations, but it remains unclear how people use them. This paper presents a case study of how people used Twitter after the Great East Japan Earthquake. First, we gathered tweets immediately after the earthquake and analyzed various factors, including locations. The results revealed two findings: (1) people in the disaster area tend to directly communicate with each other (reply-based tweet). On the other hand,(2) people in the other area prefer spread the information from the disaster area by using Re-tweet.