SPATIAL-TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA DATA RELATED TO NEPAL EARTHQUAKE 2015

Abstract. Social Medias these days have become the instant communication platform to share anything; from personal feelings to the matter of public concern, these are the easiest and aphoristic way to deliver information among the mass. With the development of Web 2.0 technologies, more and more emphasis has been given to user input in the web; the concept of Geoweb is being visualized and in the recent years, social media like Twitter, Flicker are among the popular Location Based Social Medias with locational functionality enabled in them. Nepal faced devastating earthquake on 25 April, 2015 resulting in the loss of thousands of lives, destruction in the historical-archaeological sites and properties. Instant help was offered by many countries around the globe and even lots of NGOs, INGOs and people started the rescue operations immediately; concerned authorities and people used different communication medium like Frequency Modulation Stations, Television, and Social Medias over the World Wide Web to gather information associated with the Quake and to ease the rescue activities. They also initiated campaign in the Social Media to raise the funds and support the victims. Even the social medias like Facebook, Twitter, themselves announced the helping campaign to rebuild Nepal. In such scenario, this paper features the analysis of Twitter data containing hashtag related to Nepal Earthquake 2015 together with their temporal characteristics, when were the message generated, where were these from and how these spread spatially over the internet?