The DOI matches its Crossref record; 96 of the 97 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The ripple of fear, sympathy and solidarity during the Boston bombings
Open accessAbstract
The Boston Marathon bombing presents a rare opportunity to study how a disruptive event can trigger inter-communal emotions and expressions - where members of one community express feelings about and support for members of a distant community. In this work, we use over 180 million geocoded tweets over an entire month to study how Twitter users from different cities expressed three different emotions: fear , sympathy and solidarity , in reaction to the bombings. We capture spikes in fear in different cities by using sentiment and time-series analyses, and track expressions of sympathy and solidarity based on the emergent use of two hashtags, #prayforboston and #bostonstrong, widely adopted after the bombings. We find first that the extent to which communities outside Boston express these emotions is correlated with their geographic proximity, social network connections, and residents’ direct, physical experiences with Boston (captured by the number of citizens who had visited Boston recently). This general effect shows interesting differences across the different kinds of emotions, however. Analyses show that the extent to which residents of a city visit Boston is the best predictor of fear and solidarity expression, as well as a strong predictor of the expression of sympathy. The expression of fear is also directly related to the expression of solidarity. Our study has theoretical implications regarding the diffusion of information and emotional contagion as well as practical implications for understanding how important information and social support can be effectively collected and distributed to populations in need.
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“This tool is known to work well with short text and social media data, as revealed in a large body of social computing and crisis informatics literature (Lin and Margolin, 2014; Mark et al., 2012; Saha and De Choudhury, 2017).”
From Impacts of school shooter drills on the psychological well-being of American K-12 school communities: a social media study (2021) · cites this paper as Lin and Margolin, 2014
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Social media use in disaster recovery: A systematic literature review
Ogie, R., James, S., Moore, A. R., Dilworth, T.-L., Amirghasemi, M., & Whittaker, J. (2022) · International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102783 · Cited by 199
Systematic literature review of sentiment analysis on Twitter using soft computing techniques
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Population Bias in Geotagged Tweets
Malik, M. M., Lamba, H., Nakos, C., & Pfeffer, J. (2021) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v9i4.14688 · Cited by 172
Modeling Stress with Social Media Around Incidents of Gun Violence on College Campuses
Saha, K., & De Choudhury, M. (2017) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3134727 · Cited by 124
Whose Lives Matter? Mass Shootings and Social Media Discourses of Sympathy and Policy, 2012–2014
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Metadata
- Authors
- Lin, Y.-R., & Margolin, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Lin, Yu-Ru
- Venue
- EPJ Data Science
- Published
- 2014-11-05
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2193-1127 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2149307575
- Cited by
- 72
- References
- 97
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 12.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- EPJ Data Science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- D-Scholarship@Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1423697)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Keywords
- Boston Marathon bombing, fear, sympathy, solidarity, emotional contagion, hashtags, Twitter, geographic proximity, disaster response, social support
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