Category Archives: Adaptation

Day_90 : (Re)Evacuation research literature analysis-A Text mining

Evacuation’s research literatures are divided into two categories for this analysis. One is natural disaster’s research literature conducted by all specialties. The other is social scientist’s research literature on natural disasters. The database, the Springer link, is selected to conduct all field’s evacuation research literature analysis. The E. L.Quarantelli Resource Collection (See the Website), Disaster Research Center of the University of Delaware was chosen as a target database for analyzing social science literature. The collection is one of the world’s most complete ones on the social and behavioral science aspects of disasters. These two databases’ literatures were analyzed by a text mining. To conduct the text mining, the RH Corder was used.

The following is just one result example, a content analysis of the springer link database.

  1. Search words are “evacuation AND urban AND (tsunami OR flood OR typhoon OR hurricane)”
  2. The number of extracted literature is 824 (2000-2014)
  3. The titles, key words, and abstracts of the 824 were combined into one text file
  4. The extracted words which appear over 20 times in the text are shown in Table1
  5. A co-occurrence network analysis result is indicated in Figure 1

Table 1       Extracted Words (over 20 times) and Frequencies (sorry, original Japanese version’s words are left)

wordsfreq

140715_村上先生_共起ネットワーク2

Figure 1 A co-occurrence network analysis result

In Figure1, the circle sizes around the words (Nodes sizes) mean the frequencies of the words appeared in the text. Edges mean the connections between the words. Then, you can see the above analysis (by color) result.

For instance, emergency response-preparedness-decision-support with “event” are combined with evacuation as key words. Climate-change-impact was also detected with coastal-adaptation. We can estimate that detected Taiwan-assess-community-resilience represents the Typhoon Morakot disaster. (Then, this is confirmed by returning to the original text.)

Murakami et al. (Murakami, Nakasu, Shimamura, Goto, and Ogawa, 2015) is referred.

Day_67 : Disaster Terminology

The disaster terminology is very important to have a common picture to discuss among the related people. The UNISDR provides a very useful website to confirm the term. For example, the adaptation is defined as “The adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities”. The following is the website.

Disaster Risk Reduction Terminology

Day_20 : Disaster Education

Every problem can be returned to education because people create the problem. Education can be categorized into the following three types: formal, nonformal, and informal. Formal education means school education. The non-formal education indicates the education provided by local communities, etc. Informal education is education in the family for example, from parents to children. Disasters are created by human activities, as you may know. Therefore, disaster education, of course, is very important. Disaster researchers can somehow learn this kind of basic knowledge about education as a subject to develop our points of views. We need to know that education is a very familiar but very deep word.