Patterns of Community Resilience in Social Media Communication (Poster)

ABSTRACT: Resilience is a heavily overloaded term across many disciplines ranging from ecology, mathematics, physics,
and psychology to economics. Recently, research has shifted into utilizing social media to reflect community resilience. Many studies show that these play a major role in providing support in times of crisis, enabling individuals to react in real time and prompting for action (Flynn, S., Bates, S., 2011). Overall, social media contribute to enhanced community resilience. While some of the existing work provides insights into the importance of social media communication for building community resilience to disasters, investigation into communication patterns, and mapping resilience to different needs of information during the respective stages of a disaster have been disregarded. The work described here attempts to address this deficit by providing preliminary insights into whether messages of resilience can be discovered in social media communication and how these can be used to build resilience across different stages of a disaster. Furthermore, if a message of resilience is observed, can it be classified according to categories (e.g. movement, health, critical infrastructure) and can the different expressions of this category be associated with different disaster stages? And, to what extent do messages differ because of language used, type of disaster and medium used for transmission? For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus was created and analyzed during the Central European floods of 2013, covering different types of social media communications (Twitter, Facebook). The poster provides a first overview of the results from this work.

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