Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 15, 2026

The Social Dimension of Stress: Experimental Manipulations of Social Support and Social Identity in the Trier Social Stress Test
Published on: November 19, 2015
Social sensing of floods in the UK
Rudy Arthur1, Chris A Boulton2, Humphrey Shotton1
1Computer Science, CEMPS, University of Exeter, Laver Building, North Park Road, Exeter, EX4 4QE, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes 'relevance' filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter.
Related Concept Videos
The Sense of Self: Reflected Self-Appraisal and Social Comparison
Responses to Drought and Flooding
Social Proof
Social Scripts
Social Traps
Social Facilitation

