Peter M. Landwehr

Social Media in Disaster Relief

As social media has become more integrated into peoples’ daily lives, its users have begun turning to it in times of distress. People use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms to broadcast their needs, propagate rumors and news, and stay abreast of evolving crisis situations. Disaster relief organizations have begun to craft their efforts around pulling data about where aid is needed from social media and broadcasting their own needs and perceptions of the situation. They have begun deploying new software platforms to better analyze incoming data from social media, as well as to deploy new technologies to specifically harvest messages from disaster situations.

Two 1%s Don’t Make a Whole: Comparing Simultaneous Samples from Twitter’s Streaming API

We compare samples of tweets from the Twitter Streaming API constructed from different connections that tracked the same popular keywords at the same time. We find that on average, over 96% of the tweets seen in one sample are seen in all others. Those tweets found only in a subset of samples do not significantly differ from tweets found in all samples in terms of user popularity or tweet structure. We conclude they are likely the result of a technical artifact rather than any systematic bias.

Games, Social Simulations, and Data-Integration for Policy Decisions: The SUDAN Game

In this article, the authors discuss the development of the SUDAN GAME, an interactive model of the country in the time period leading up to the Sudanese referendum on the secession of the South. While many simulations are designed to educate about their subjects, the SUDAN GAME is intended to be a prototype for policy making via gameplay. It is implemented within COSMOPOLIS, a massively multiplayer online game that is currently undergoing development. In this article, the authors discuss the game’s design and how it can be used for policy development, with a focus on the underlying model and some discussion of the COSMOPOLIS implementation. They situate the game relative to other games that have crowdsourced serious problems and discuss the meaning of the policy solutions and collaboration witnessed along players. They conclude with a discussion of future development to be done to improve and expand upon the concepts used in their game.