Hurricane Harvey: Spatial Analysis Using Twitter

Hurricane Harvey: Spatial Analysis Using Twitter was a collaborative project conducted by my classmates and me as part of the final sequence in GIS Design and Applications at UC Santa Barbara. Spanning ten weeks, the project culminated in a final presentation at Spatial@UCSB 2018.

Alongside Gabriel Hernandez, Lisa Nguyen, and Alyssa White, we collected geotagged tweets from individuals seeking help during Hurricane Harvey. Our goal was to extract location data from these tweets to identify patterns that could inform the placement of crisis centers in future disasters. We also explored the potential of using social media as an alternative communication method to 911 during emergency system failures.

This was a highly complex project involving the use of multiple APIs and the Crimson Hexagon platform for data collection and analysis. While we unexpectedly demonstrated that social media data could serve as a proxy for population mapping, we found only limited overlap between social media-based help requests and official rescue operations.

I remain deeply interested in this project and hope to revisit the dataset in the future. Given the constraints of a ten-week academic timeline, I believe a more extensive analysis could reveal new insights and further the conversation on the role of social media in emergency response.