Topics in Social Media for Disaster Management - A German Case Study on the Flood 2013

The paper presents the results of a German case study on social media use during the flood 2013 in Central Europe. During this event, thousands of volunteers organized themselves via social media without being motivated or guided by professional disaster management. The aim of our research was to show and analyze the real potential of social media for disaster management and to enable the public organizations to get into touch with the people and take advantage as well as control of the power of social media. In our investigation, we applied state-of-the-art technology from Natural Language Processing, mainly topic modeling, to test and demonstrate its usefulness for computer-based media analysis in modern disaster management. At the same time, the analysis was a comparative study of social media content in context of a disaster. We found that Twitter played its most prominent part in the exchange of current factual information on the state of the event, while Facebook prevalently was used for emotional support and organization of volunteers help. Accordingly, social media are powerful not only with respect to their volume, velocity and variety but also come with their own content, language and ways of structuring information.