Concept of "People as Sensors"
The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief summary of the related literature regarding "people as sensors" and to propose a conceptual study framework for this book. A variety of studies have tried to use social media to improve situational awareness based on various approaches. Although, as discussed in Chap. 1, there is a possibility of using social media to fill the gap of existing recovery indicators by its timeliness and variety, to the author's best knowledge, there is a paucity of research into how social media could be used to analyze and gauge community recovery. Although detecting incidents and situational awareness during and immediate after a disaster are essential tasks to save lives and reduce further losses, this study argues that there is enormous potential in utilizing social media data to look into affected people's recovery activities to regain their normal routines. This chapter is structured as follows: in Sect. 2.1, the current study's main viewpoint, the "people as sensors" approach in the context of disaster related research, is introduced. In Sect. 2.2, previous work regarding disaster management and social media by focusing on the "people as sensors" approach is provided. Based on the literature review in Sect. 2.2, the author introduces the conceptual research framework of the study in Sect. 2.3.