Emoji usage in LastQuake app comments

The first qualitative analysis of fear in LastQuake comments revealed that some emojis are used as for instance “scary :(”; or “lo ms horrible que he vivido. sin ganas de repetirlo jams :(“. As LastQuake doesn’t include regular social media emojis, user adopted the basics emojis made of combination of punctuation marks. LastQuake has been designed to be easily used even with limited access to the Internet and should remain low bandwidth consuming to ensure its universality. However, opportunities to include emojis could be further researched. This could facilitate the expression of emotions and thus the study of fear. Scientific research on emojis for disaster related technologies has been prolific over the past years. It has been demonstrated how, besides cultural differences in use, emojis have been adopted globally and are part of the tech culture. They can ease communication, especially during disasters (SwiftKey, 2015; Chen et al., 2017). Emojis also turned useful for researchers as it eases sentiment analysis in crisis events (Santhanam et al., 2018).

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Cultural Factors: Norms/values, Languages, Communication

Hazards: Natural hazards

Disaster Phases: Response

Types of Actors Concerned: Non-active citizens, NGOs