What can Twitter tell us about Hurricane Sandy, specifically how the aftermath of the superstorm is impacting the USA?

Quite a lot, it turns out, thanks to this interactive visualisation from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University Of Oxford, who collected tweets containing the words “flood” or “flooding” between October 29-30 to evaluate how people are coping with and talking about the disaster on Twitter.

The Oxford team tracked tweets in both English and Spanish, and, as you might expect, it turns out that the vast majority of messages about the Sandy flooding are taking place on the East Coast of the USA. However, there are pockets of discourse throughout a lot of the States, as well as some notable absentees, all of which are nicely illustrated by this map (click to enlarge).

You can view an interactive visualisation of the study here.

(Source: The Guardian.)