New Social Media Monitoring Tool: CrisisTracker

Post by: Kim Stephens

The post on this site “Data Data Everywhere…Monitoring Social Media in a Crisis” is my most popular, it seems everyone is looking for tools to help with the enormous task of organizing and making sense of the torrent of information provided through social media platforms during large scale incidents. Phd candidate Jakob Rogstadius of the University of Madeira‘s Interactive Technologies Institute commented on that post with a link to a new tool they are calling “CrisisTracker.”  He indicated that the tool is currently being tested with a deployment in Syria to collect and organize millions of tweets related to the ongoing civil war. The tool’s design team includes researchers at Madeira University, University of Oulu and IBM Research.

See the video below which describes the platform and its functionality. The about page of their site also has some good information including a comparison between the tool and Ushahidi. They state:

The biggest difference between the platform and Ushahidi is that Ushahidi focuses on curation of user-submitted reports, while CrisisTracker mines Twitter for reports, clusters them, and supports curation of report clusters. Both systems require humans to annotate pieces of information with meta-data such as location and report category.

Introduction to CrisisTracker from Jakob Rogstadius on Vimeo.

Let me know what you think.