ABSTRACT
The online representation of a crisis mirrors, certainly from a different perspective, what happens in reality. As the matter of fact, this is the potential that monitoring activity of social media flow of data during an emergency has. The analysis of this stream of messages during the Sardinian cyclone has proved this correlation. Based on a methodological literature review, this chapter discusses elaboration of the research method which was framed in three different steps: data gathering, identification of coding categories and filtering parameters. Different researches have shown how microblogging platforms can have an important role in enabling emergency responses: allowing people to produce and share multimedia messages on a variety of channels, they can be considered as one of the sources for the creation of so-called situational awareness. New technological devices provide people with the immediate possibility to share almost every kind of content: text, photos, videos and links.
