Ray Kameda
Assignment 6
1.
Write a description of what you would like to do on your project (what is the question or questions you would
like to answer, the issue you are tackling, etc.)
For my final GIS project, I would like to investigate the damage from the Japan Earthquake that occurred
on March 11, 2011 and the effectiveness of relief efforts that immediately followed it. Specifically I would
like to investigate how well the Japan Crisis Map, (http://www.sinsai.info/ushahidi/) which was created
from twitter requests, represented the tsunami damaged areas of most need. I would like to do this by
investigating the distribution of twittered requests and its correlation with areas of most need or if the
people in areas of the most need were not adequately represented by the twitter crisis map. I am not sure
how exactly I would go about doing this with the little data that is available.
Project Question:
Did the crisis map in the early stages (1st week after the earthquake) accurately represent the need of
people in shelters of heavily affected areas?
2.
provide at least four briefly annotated examples of similar analyses (some or all of these should come from
peer-reviewed journals if possible) - briefly annotated means that you have a paragraph about each example
- if you cannot find examples of exactly what you are doing, find examples at least in the same general field
or one using similar data sets
First of all, I wasn’t able to find any published articles that have seriously investigated the effectiveness of crisis
mapping in representing the actual needs of the crisis victims.
http://www.humanitarianforum.org/data/files/crowdsourcinghaiti.pdf
This article was a general review of the Haiti crisis mapping and how it crowd sourced data from social media sites
such as twitter, email, sms, Facebook, blogs, etc. There was short diagram that showed the statistics of the types of
tagged reports, and it showed how vital signs dominated the crisis map. I will probably be doing a similar statistic of
the types of reports in the Japan Crisis Map.
Acrobat Document
Mahendara et al., 2011
Acrobat Document
Sinaga et al., 2010
These articles are tsunami vulnerability assessments and I will try to use some of the parameters to do a simple
tsunami vulnerability assessment. Otherwise I might keep looking until I find an already conveniently mapped tsunami
vulnerability layer.
http://www.libyacrisismap.net/bigmap
Currently the Crisis map for Libya has a great interfase design with an interactive statistics bar and you can select on
and off different categories. I would like to do a similar type of graph for the Japan Crisis Map.
3.
describe the methods you think you will use (because we haven't covered analysis in detail yet, this may be
very preliminary)
I think I first will try to determine what the most tsunami affected areas were from various sources of data
including satellite imagery, maybe an elementary tsunami vulnerability analysis, based on topographic features, like
slope, elevation, distance from shoreline, topographic relation to tsunami direction, all weighted based on other
vulnerability assessments like from Sinaga, et. al., 2011. Then I will try to get the twitter Japan Crisis map data from
www.sinsai.info 1 day at a time after the earthquake and try to see if the distribution of the crisis mapped points in the
categories: such as Rescue request, Aid request, Missing person Request, etc. match the most tsunami-affected
areas.
4.
list the data layers you will need for this project (if you know where you will get them from, list the source,
otherwise indicate that you will need help locating this data set) and include the minimum accuracy you will
accept (e.g., for the location of a stream, does it need to be within 500 feet of its actual location or within 10
feet? Your answer will depend on your analysis purpose and the scale of your project). Note: This section of
your report could take the form of a table with each data layer occupying one row.
Data Layers
 Japanese Political Boundaries:
 Land use map:
 Miyagi Prefecture Population Density
 Elevation to determine slope and high ground etc.
All the data layers above I can get from the Japan GIS database http://nlftp.mlit.go.jp/ksj/ but its
geodata in the form of XML files. So I’m going to have trouble importing these files into ArcMap.
I might be able to get some shapefiles from the site
http://cegrp.cga.harvard.edu/japan/?q=resources_data but the accuracy and currency is questionable.
Ideally I would like data within within 100-200m.


Japan Crisis Map from www.sinsai.info
Evacuation shelters: ideally with more complete records of the number of evacuees.
Ideally more up to date data would be ideal but the current Shapefile I have from the Harvard site is not
up to date. The Miyagi prefecture has a fairly detailed account about all the districts but it is in PDF form
and I may have to digitize this data. http://www.pref.miyagi.jp/kinkyu.htm
 Number of Confirmed Casualties and Missing
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/04/07/japan-earthquake-most-complete-summary-of-the-fire-andpolice-damage-statistics/
There are some upto date statistics, but in the form of tables So I would need to geocode these statistics.
Unfortunately this means that it would be t the district level and I don’t know if I could really effectively
use this data. Ideally I would like a higher resolution casualties/missing dataset.
 Satellite Imagery- with analysis of the extent of tsunami inundation.
Not sure If im going to incorporate satellite imagery in the analysis but I might use it for the base layer.