“Eventually, we would like the site to be an analytical tool for someone with a user inputted search term to gather live tweet data and analyze it anyway they want,” Schnitzer says. “Development time for the website was very short because we used the application programming interface, API, from both Google and Twitter.”The website will only stay up for the duration of Hurricane Sandy, but the team plans to continue developing the site’s planned functionality indefinitely. “We had originally been planning to map the election with this project, but when we saw the opportunity in Sandy we sat down and created working prototype that could collect and display Sandy’s Twitter data,” Schnitzer says. The class gives students hands-on experience with technologies, such as Global Positioning Systems, Geographic Information Systems and virtual globes like Google Earth, to provide a better representation and understanding of the earth. October 25, 2012: Hurricane Sandy makes landfall in Cuba as a Category 2 hurricane with 105 mph winds, then travels to Haiti and the Bahamas, killing 54 people in Haiti, 11 people in the Dominican Republic, and two people in the Bahamas. The students have spent the 2012 fall quarter learning new uses of social media in their Geographic Information Science and Technology class with Brian Tomaszewski, a professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies. as a weakened storm, but that hardly diminished. “If everything holds up, we’ll have stored up to 150,000 geo-located tweets by the end of Oct. Henris track shifted east Sunday, which spared eastern Long Island a dreaded direct hit, making landfall near Westerly, Rhode Island at 12:15 p.m. “We want to collect a timeline of tweets from Sandy’s start to finish,” Williams says. During and after Hurricane Sandy, the USGS monitored water levels, storm tide, wave height, and high-water marks at over 224 locations. At least 191 people were killed along the path of the storm in seven countries. Preliminary estimates of losses that include business interruption surpass 50 billion, behind only Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Sandy was the 18th named tropical cyclone of the busy 2012 Atlantic hurricane season that produced a total of 19 named storms. It then stores the message and location in a database, before displaying the next tweet. Sandy is estimated to have caused damage of at least 20 billion. In fact, two students saw Hurricane Sandy as an opportunity to harness the power of social media to observe the geographic implications of a storm.īrian Schnitzer, an information technology master’s student from Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Rob Williams, an information technology master’s student from Harvard, Mass., created their own website for tracking and mapping tweets related to Hurricane Sandy.Ĭurrently, the app pins a tweet regarding Hurricane Sandy on the world map and displays it for 10 seconds. Just because a record-breaking superstorm hit the Northeast doesn’t mean Rochester Institute of Technology students will miss classes or stop learning. A screenshot from a website for tracking and mapping tweets related to Hurricane Sandy, created by information technology graduate students Brian Schnitzer and Rob Williams.
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