Can twitter really save your life? A case study of visual social media analytics for situation awareness

Social media monitoring for crisis intelligence is on the brink of commercialization and widespread adoption. To close the gap between research and application, this paper presents results of a broad-scale case study on visual analytics of social media for situation awareness. We asked twenty-nine domain experts from disaster response and critical infrastructure management to investigate various crisis intelligence tasks based on actual Twitter data, which was recorded during the 2013 German Flood. To this end, the ScatterBlogs visual analytics framework, a platform that provides reference implementations of tools and techniques from ongoing research, was given to them as an integrated toolbox. This paper presents and reviews the domain experts' individual performances with the system, their comments about the usefulness and applicability of its capabilities, and the results of a questionnaire each participant had to complete. Based on this evaluation, we will answer the question if and how visual analytics of social media can shape tomorrow's crisis intelligence.