A major motivation of this project is to explore Protective Decision Making. One question being asked is:

What can we learn about the protective decisions a person makes regarding their physical location from his or her geo-located Twitter activity?

With such a large amount of data, however, it is impossible to perform qualitative analysis on all Twitterers that were active during Hurricane Sandy. The goal of this project, then, is to develop a method of quantitative and geo-spatial analysis to identify users that may have been ordered to evacuate during Hurricane Sandy.

Below is a map showing users with a base tweeting location inside of a New York City Evacuation Zone A, presumably most or all were ordered to evacuate on Sunday, October 28, 2012.

The first form of this project was a Geography Project for GEOG 5303 with Professor Stefen Leyk at CU. The data aggregation and continuation of the research is done by Project EPIC. Original project collaborators include Andrew Hardin and Ellie Falletta from CU Geography.

There are two associated GitHub repositories with this project: