Using Twitter data to correlate power grid malfunctions
There's an increasing excitement about using new technologies - like social media and 'big data' - in research about disasters and emergencies. There are a large number of possible ways of approaching this question, though, so developing these methods first requires 'pilot' attempts at testing whether they actually work. In this post, I'll explore an article - Embracing Human Noise as a Resilience Indicator: Twitter as Power Grid Correlate - that attempts a proof-of-concept for one way of applying these tweets. The article takes on three very different tasks, each of which feels a little disconnected from the previous. They (1) explore the contrasting definitions of resilience, (2) investigate Tweets as a way of measuring impact on a community, and (3) reflect on challenges with using Twitter data for this purpose. I'll discuss each of these in sequence: The first thing the authors set out to do is to define what resilience means. As they rightfully poi