Background:
In June, 2013 the state of Uttarakhand in Northern India witnessed one of the most devastating floods and landslides following a massive cloudburst. Destruction of buildings, bridges and roads left many people dead and many more stranded and difficult to reach. It took several days before the situation in Uttarakhand could return to normalcy. Less than a year later, in September, 2014 the state of Jammu & Kashmir also witnessed a similar disaster that has left many homeless, and half the state submerged. The massive rescue and relief operations that were launched after each of these two natural calamities involved the participation of government agencies, military search and rescue teams, social activists, NGOs political and social organizations and other volunteers. This proposed project finds its background in the role played by social media in facilitating rescue and relief work that was carried out in the aftermath of these two natural disasters. Very interestingly, while telephone lines and other modes of communication were destroyed by the heavy floods in the affected regions, social media, took over as the primary mode of disseminating information in relation to the relief and rescue operations, and collection of funds. In this project, I shall specifically analyze the networks and connections built by the use of the ‘hashtag’ (defined in the ‘Additional Information’ at the end of this blog post) on two major social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, when the flood relief and rescue operations were underway in Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir.
In June, 2013 the state of Uttarakhand in Northern India witnessed one of the most devastating floods and landslides following a massive cloudburst. Destruction of buildings, bridges and roads left many people dead and many more stranded and difficult to reach. It took several days before the situation in Uttarakhand could return to normalcy. Less than a year later, in September, 2014 the state of Jammu & Kashmir also witnessed a similar disaster that has left many homeless, and half the state submerged. The massive rescue and relief operations that were launched after each of these two natural calamities involved the participation of government agencies, military search and rescue teams, social activists, NGOs political and social organizations and other volunteers. This proposed project finds its background in the role played by social media in facilitating rescue and relief work that was carried out in the aftermath of these two natural disasters. Very interestingly, while telephone lines and other modes of communication were destroyed by the heavy floods in the affected regions, social media, took over as the primary mode of disseminating information in relation to the relief and rescue operations, and collection of funds. In this project, I shall specifically analyze the networks and connections built by the use of the ‘hashtag’ (defined in the ‘Additional Information’ at the end of this blog post) on two major social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, when the flood relief and rescue operations were underway in Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir.
Primary Questions:
(1)
Can
we use social network analysis to understand the role played by ‘hashtags’ on Facebook
and Twitter in connecting government organizations, NGOs, media persons, volunteers and civil society, and helping them
coordinate in their common effort to collect funds for relief, and conduct rescue
operations in Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir?
(2)
How
can we use the findings and patterns arising from our analysis in question
(1) to make a case for institutionalising the use of social media
(particularly using the hashtag) for coordinating disaster relief in the future?
Hypothesis:
Having been a regular follower of both the flood situations on Twitter and Facebook, my
hypothesis is that the use of hashtags on Facebook and Twitter played a pivotal role in disseminating information and in connecting various government organizations, NGOs,
media persons, and volunteers from all over India in their collective efforts for fund collection,
rescue and rehabilitation in both Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir. In the future, institutionalizing the use of hashtags on social media will help mobilize people from all over the country and lead to development of effective disaster relief management systems.
Collecting and Organizing the Data:
For
this project, I will need to collate two separate sets of data (one each for
Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand) available publicly on Twitter and Facebook.
Each data set will cover a time period of 1 (one) month starting from the
respective date of each disaster. The methodology to cull out relevant information
from the information available on these social media platforms will include identifying
and collecting information including in relation to (a) the most frequently
used hashtags in each flood relief campaign, (b) the most frequently used retweets
in relation to the flood relief, (c) the most frequent tweeters and most followed
tweeters connected to these hashtags, (d) the most frequently followed Facebook
pages running flood relief campaigns using these hashtags, (e) hashtags that were specifically promoted by the mainstream Indian news media or government bodies. A qualitative
assessment would need to be carried out to classify messages using hashtags based
on the nature and usefulness of the information conveyed by them from a
disaster management perspective.
Methodology/ Important Network Measures:
Social network analysis will be as a tool used to analyze how groups of people on Twitter and Facebook connected with the others on these social media platforms through the use of hashtags. I would specifically be interested in seeing how various NGOs and activists communicated with each other, and with various government organisations on these social media platforms.
Eigenvector centrality measures and high betweenness centrality measures will be important tools to identify specific hashtags that were the major influencers of the network, and those that helped spread information to different groups within the network respectively.
Clique and sub-group analysis can be used to find out if certain organizations, people, media persons or groups are promoting the use of certain hashtags.
Another important factor while studying connections within the network will be an analysis of whether specific hashtags were used to convey information of a specific nature.
Besides the use of UCINET and Net Draw, I will also explore the possibility of using other tools for visualizing and analyzing data on social media (NodeXL, Graph CT, etc.).
Conclusions:
This analysis will help us better understand the powerful role that social media can play in helping people build more effective and coordinated mechanisms in their search, rescue and rehabilitation efforts. Drawing from the role played by social media in the two situations, we can formulate mechanisms to coordinate the use of hashtags on social media to build helpful databases of networks of affected people, NGOs, media persons and volunteers, on social media which will help locate missing people and identify specific areas that need immediate attention from the rescue teams.
Additional Information:
The ‘Hashtag’:
A hashtag is a metadata tag, containing a word or un-spaced phrase prefixed
with the character ‘#’, and usually used on social media platforms.
Social
Media use in India: According to a study, India has 243.2 million internet users,
and 106 million active social media users. See:
Here
are some news articles on the role played by social media in the aftermath of
the floods:
(3) http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-social-media-ray-of-hope-for-uttarakhand-flood-victims-kin-1853425
(I will not be taking the second module in Fall 2014)
(I will not be taking the second module in Fall 2014)
1 comment:
This is a well-researched and -developed project proposal. You have a clear question and have delineated a number of pertinent network measures for analysis. Well done.
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