For emergency responders, the utility of social media hinges on available and accurate geographic information. Responders must locate events reported on social media to assess a situation, coordinate resources, and provide assistance. Unfortunately, however, social media often lacks geographic metadata and, if available, can inaccurately reflect the locations of reported events. Toponyms, place names in social media content, provide another source of geographic information yet toponym usage in emergencies remains poorly understood.

To address this gap, this study examines toponym usage across 22,343 tweets posted during a severe storm in the Northeastern United States. Tweets were qualitatively coded for nineteen types of storm-related information as well as toponym usage, location reference, and granularity. Findings show that users i) include more geographic information, including toponyms and geotags, in tweets about emergencies than about other topics; ii) report geographically distributed events but tend to include toponyms rather than geotags when reporting local information; and iii) include mostly municipal and regional toponyms in tweets about emergencies but tend to include hyperlocal toponyms and additional municipal or regional markers in reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption.

Together these findings offer implications for social sensing applications in emergency response and management. These include more opportunities for course-grained damage assessment than fine-grained situational awareness and the need for internal and external sources of geographic information to distinguish information about local and remote events. Lastly, findings suggest opportunities for passive and active sensing approaches responsive to the recipient design of social media: users provide additional geographic context that help others distinguish local and remote risks within noisy information spaces that emerge during geographically distributed crises.

对于应急人员，社交媒体的实用性取决于可用的准确地理信息。响应者必须找到社交媒体上报告的事件，以评估情况，协调资源并提供帮助。但是，不幸的是，社交媒体通常缺少地理元数据，并且如果可用，它们可能会不准确地反映所报告事件的位置。地名，即社交媒体内容中的地名，提供了地理信息的另一个来源，但是在紧急情况下对地名的使用仍然知之甚少。

为了解决这一差距，本研究调查了美国东北部严重风暴期间发布的22,343条推文中的地名使用情况。对Tweet进行了定性编码，以编码19种类型的与风暴有关的信息以及地名用法，位置参考和粒度。调查结果表明，与其他主题相比，用户i）在有关紧急情况的推文中包含更多的地理信息，包括地名和地理标签；ii）报告地理上分散的事件，但在报告本地信息时往往包含地名而不是地理标签；iii）在有关紧急情况的推文中主要包括市政和地区地名，但在基础设施损坏和服务中断的报告中往往包括超地方性地名和其他市政或地区标志。

这些发现共同为社交感知在应急响应和管理中的应用提供了启示。这些包括比细粒度的态势感知有更多机会进行基于过程的损害评估，以及需要使用内部和外部地理信息来区分有关本地事件和远程事件的信息。最后，研究结果提出了响应社交媒体的接收者设计的被动和主动感知方法的机会：用户提供了额外的地理环境，可以帮助其他人区分在地理分布危机期间出现的嘈杂信息空间内的本地和远程风险。