Spatiotemporal Change Analysis of Earthquake Emergency Information Based on Microblog Data: A Case Study of the “8.8” Jiuzhaigou Earthquake

Abstract

Information from social media microblogging has been applied to management of emergency situations following disasters. In particular, such blogs contain much information about the public perception of disasters. However, the effective collection and use of disaster information from microblogs still presents a significant challenge. In this paper, a spatial distribution detection method is established using emergency information based on the urgency degree grading of microblogs and spatial autocorrelation analysis. Moreover, a character-level convolutional neural network classifier is applied for microblog classification in order to mine the spatio-temporal change process of emergency rescue information. The results from the Jiuzhaigou (Sichuan, China) earthquake case study demonstrate that different emergency information types exhibit different time variation characteristics. Moreover, spatial autocorrelation analysis based on the degree of text urgency can exclude uneven spatial distribution influences of the number of microblog users, and accurately determine the level of urgency of the situation. In addition, the classification and spatio-temporal analysis methods combined in this study can effectively mine the required emergency information, allowing us to understand emergency information spatio-temporal changes. Our study can be used as a reference for microblog information applications within the field of emergency rescue activity.