Thursday, October 23, 2014

Networks in the emergent situation ~the Case of Great East Japan Earthquake~

Introduction/Background:
On 11 March 2011, Japan was hit by the most powerful earthquake it had experienced in a thousand years. The earthquake and tsunami took the lives of more than 20,000 people in Tohoku. About 370 km, from the epicenter of the earthquake, Tokyo residents also felt the strong earthquake. When it happened, I was working in Tokyo and soon after that I called my parents living near Tohoku using a cell phone, but I could not get through to them no matter how often I call. However, I could get the detail information by the social media, such as Facebook or Twitter. People could communicate on the IP network. On the other hand, even some official city HPs were shut down because the information system was completely destroyed by tsunami. I will analyze how people made communication in such a big disaster.

Primary Question
How people who suffered damage from the Great East Japan Earthquake made a communication with others? Where they sent a signal to? In the disaster, how the communication infrastructure works and how it can be improved for the emergency situation?

Hypothesis:
I hypothesize the IP network was tougher than a telephone line. The people in Tohoku would communicate with close family or friends near them, but there would be the huge signal flow from the big cities.

Data:
I will need the data of the traffic of information in time of disaster from Japanese main telecommunication carriers, NTT, KDDI, Softbank or government or research institutes. Also I will need the data of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, mixi or other social media.

Methodology/Important Network Measures:
I will have datasets of the media people could use and that they tried to use but could not. I will make the attribution file, which will include the region they were living, the area they tried to communicate, age, and the communication tool they used in the disaster. Also, I will have datasets of the signals that came to areas affected by the earthquake. With this analysis, I will look how the flow of information changed as times passed, and how the communication infrastructure must be changed.

Conclusions:
From my experience, I would like to analyze the information flow in the emergent situation. The ICT technology has developed dramatically now and I had strongly believed the toughness of it, but I found that it still had a weakness and there was room for improvement. By using SNA, I would like to reveal both the advantage and weakness points of the communication system.


I will be taking the second module

1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

While I admire you for wanting to do this because of your personal experience, you will need to do some more thinking about your question, as it's way too broad, and your data, as you've just put down every data provider there is, and, unless you've got some very powerful connections, you'll either not get it or it will be overwhelmingly huge. In short, you need a do-able project, and you've not convinced me that this is one.