Analysis and Implementation of Software Tools to Support Research in Crisis Informatics

The field of crisis informatics is expanding, in large part because emergency response has become increasingly focused on and affected by social media. Correspondingly, social media datasets collected from disaster events continue to become larger and more intractable. Emergency response events can generate data sets with millions of entries; sifting through the data by hand is no longer feasible. Instead, crisis informatics researchers require software that allows them to perform statistical analysis and filtering operations to reduce data sets to more manageable sizes. This thesis presents an analysis of what software is best for crisis informatics analysts, beginning with the initial process of determining the necessary tools and services, the subsequent implementation, and finally a usability study