Launching a Library of Crisis Hashtags on Twitter

I recently posted the following question on the CrisisMappers list-serve: “Does anyone know whether a list of crisis hashtags exists?”

There are several reasons why such a hashtag list would be of added value to the CrisisMappers community and beyond. First, an analysis of Twitter hashtags used during crises over the past few years could be quite insightful; interesting new patterns may be evolving. Second, the resulting analysis could be used as a guide to find (and create) new hashtags when future crises unfold. Third, a library of hashtags would make it easier to collect historical datasets of crisis information shared on Twitter for the purposes of analysis & social computing research. To be sure, without this data, developing more sophisticated machine learning platforms like the Twitter Dashboard for the Humanitarian Cluster System would be serious challenge indeed.

After posting my question on CrisisMappers and Twitter, it was clear that no such library existed. So my colleague Sara Farmer launched a Google Spreadsheet to crowdsource an initial list. Since I was working on a similar list, I’ve created a combined spreadsheet which is available and editable here. Please do add any other crisis hashtags you may know about so we can make this the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource available to everyone. Thank you!

Whilst doing this research, I came across two potentially interesting and helpful hashtag websites: Hashonomy.com and Hashtags.org.