A path forward for leveraging social media to improve the study of community resilience

Abstract Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter provide a unique channel of communication between individuals, groups and organizations. This communication is valuable to individuals as it allows for reaching increasingly wide audiences of diverse populations and has proven to be particularly useful for distributed problem solving and collective action, particularly during crisis events. The advancement of social networks for personal communication as well as collective intelligence and collective action also increases their value to researchers interested in gaining fundamental insights related to individuals and communities. Twitter, in particular, provides a unique perspective as the social network is widely adopted, user-driven, and network-based. These properties of the Twitter platform make it a valuable source of data for understanding the dynamics within large communities of individuals. In this paper, we motivate the use of Twitter as a viable source of data in understanding communities, with specific emphasis on a community's resilience to natural disasters and crisis events. Here, we discuss the literature on the use of social media for resilience analytics. We describe how social media can complement and improve current methods for evaluating community resilience by creating datasets based on flexible temporal and spatial scales, as well as allowing for the ability to quantify system transformation. We also provide a detailed tutorial on how to access, process and analyze twitter data, and discuss the platform's limitations in the spirit of improved transparency in research at the nexus of social media and community resilience. Finally, we propose future directions for research at the intersection of community resilience and social media.