Citation

Thom D, Kruger R, Ertl T. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 2015; 22(7): 1816-1829.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers))

DOI

10.1109/TVCG.2015.2511733

PMID

26841398

Abstract

The use of social media monitoring for public safety is on the brink of commercialization and practical adoption. To close the gap between research and application, this paper presents results of a two-phase study on visual analytics of social media for public safety. For the first phase, we conducted a large field study, in which twenty-nine practitioners from disaster response and critical infrastructure management were asked to investigate crisis intelligence tasks based on Twitter data recorded during the 2013 German Flood. To this end, the ScatterBlogs visual analytics system, a platform that provides reference implementations of tools and techniques popular in research, was given to them as an integrated toolbox. We reviewed the domain experts' individual performances with the system as well as their comments about the usefulness of techniques. In the second phase, we built on this feedback about ScatterBlogs in order to sketch out a system and create additional tools specifically adapted to the collected requirements. The performance of the old lab prototype is finally compared against the re-design in a controlled user study.

Language: en