Requirement
In this request you will have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned this semester about programming to an actual problem and actual data. For this request we will use social media data collected during the 2014 Carlton Complex Wildfire in Eastern Washington State. This data set was part of my dissertation research on the integration of public social media communication into emergency response.
The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has changed how members of the public communicate and share information with each other during crisis and disaster events. Researchers in the field of crisis informatics look at social media communications for insight into how these technologies are reshaping the information space surrounding a disaster and provide new ways for the public to participate in both sharing of information and response. My research focuses on the challenges faced by emergency responders as they work to leverage these channels as part of their emergency communications plan and also the solutions being developed to support the monitoring of an often complex and unwieldy information space as events unfold.
I work with an innovative group of emergency responders who are part of the social media in emergency management community (SMEM) that have pioneered a new form of digital volunteerism within the emergency response community called a Virtual Operational Support Team (VOST). Members of VOST teams have a mix of social media communication skills and training in public information work and emergency response protocols. During a disaster, a VOST team extends the resources of the emergency response team on the ground coordinating public social media communications and gathering relevant situational awareness information for the incident management team.
This dataset was taken from the 2014 Carlton Complex Wildfire. The fire started on July 14th, when a lightning storm moved through the Methow Valley in Eastern Washington State. On July 17th, adverse weather conditions caused the fire to grow explosively overnight from approximately forty-nine thousand acres to over a hundred and fifty thousand acres. This rate of fire growth is somewhat unprecedented and the fires burned through the towns of Pateros and Twisp resulting in large-scale evacuations and the destruction of over 300 homes. The fire also destroyed critical infrastructure resulting in widespread power and cellular outages in many place for over a week. The data set for this fire starts on July 17th when Portland NIMO, a federal Type I team, was assigned to the fire and the NIMO VOST was activated until July 27th when the team stood down. The fire ultimately grew to 256 thousand acres making it the largest wildfire in Washington State history (eclipsed by the 2015 Okanogan Complex in the same area a year later).
As a researcher on CU’s Project EPIC, my role on the VOST was to provide analytical support to the public information team on the ground using data collected through the Twitter API. I developed Python scripts that expanded the links to embedded content and massaged the data in useful ways for analysis in Tableau, a data visualization tool. At the end of each day, I worked on a comprehensive summary that was forwarded to the public information team as a reference for the morning briefing the following day.
Twitter is a particularly interesting platform for analysis during a disaster because the Twitter stream can show you what is relevant in the moment across a wide variety of sources. The ability to retweet information reinforces its currency and acts as recommendation to others in a Twitterer’s network or following the conversation. In addition, the ability to embed links and media provides visibility to what is being shared across multiple social media platforms simultaneously.
Data Set Description
The full dataset for this fire contains over 24 thousand tweets and related information. I hava created multiple data extract files from this dataset so that you can work with information on a more manageable scale.
As part of the analysis, we coded the most commonly occurring sources of information (Twitter accounts and URL domains) using the following values:
Tweet extracts
Each row in the tweet extracts is an individual tweet and contains the following columns:
A final message
After the user selects No, and you exit your loop, you need to print another message to the user. In this message, briefly explain the easiest, hardest, and most and least enjoyable portions of this project. Then, exit the program.
Implementation Details/ Technical Requirements
Store data from the files in an object
Your program needs to have at least one class. A technical requirement of this project is that you create a class to support the functionality of the program. The class(es) you create will depend on the problem and data you are working with. For instance, if you are working with individual tweets you may need a Tweet class. If you are working geocoded tweets you may also want a Geocode class that stores the latitude /longitude data.
The first thing your program needs to do, even before displaying the welcome message, is input the data from the txt files. Data should be read in from the files and stored in the appropriate variable in your class to support what your program does. You should structure your program to read in all data only one time.
Other requirements:
- All variables in your class need to be private and accessed through public methods. For example, if one of the class variables is latitude then you will need getLatitude() and setLatitude() methods.
- You need at least three objects. For example if you create a class Tweet, then you need at least three instances of Tweet in your program.
- You are welcome to generate new data files to support your program’s functionality. For example, if you are working with the URL domains extract, you may want to limit your analysis to domains that occur at least 25 times. The data in these sub-extracts is sorted by count, so you can import the .csv file into Excel and delete the rows that fall below 25. You can also write a program or talk to us about the specific slice of data you are interested in.
- If you store data in an array, you can create an array that is larger than you need and leave some of it unused. Look at the arrays in the AppleFarmer class for an example of what you might do for this request. You will need to keep track of how much ofthe array is used. The technique for doing this is the same as using the Curren tDay variable in AppleFarmer.
- The easiest way to read the .csv files is to use getline() for each line in the file and then use stringstream to parse the line. 6. There are examples of how to do both of these things in notes provided on the Moodle.
- When you submit your program, include all data files you used in your project directory.