CrisisLex — 2013_Boston_bombings

A Twitter dataset of 1,000 tweets, collected by Olteanu et al. via Twitter API during the 2013 Boston bombings crisis. Each record contains tweet text, crisis type, country, event name. The dataset is notable for its tweets from the 2013 Boston bombings crisis, collected systematically across 26 events for comparative analysis. Intended for research into crisis informatics, disaster response, social media analysis, cross-crisis comparison, emergency communication patterns, situation awareness.

#Boston marathon bombing#Crisis informatics#Crisislex

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Analytics

9.1
Flesch–Kincaid grade
US school grade level
11.7
Automated readability index
Frequent terms
bostonmarathonprayforbostonbombingbostonmarathontsarnaevsuspectexplosionspeoplebombexplosiondzhokharvictimsprayersamptragedynewsfbibreakingfinishworldaffectedtodaylinethoughtsattackinjuredbombingspoliceoldvideorunningheartphotosuspectssadyearlivebombsdeadkilledpraydonfamiliescnngoodhttprighttamerlanhelp
Topic clusters

Topic 0

suspect
bombing
boston
marathon
police
fbi
bomb
photo

Topic 1

explosion
line
finish
marathon
injure
boston
report
video

Topic 2

tsarnaev
dzhokhar
tamerlan
fbi
suspect
seek
brother
hide

Topic 3

prayer
affect
thought
tragedy
boston
event
family
prayforboston

Topic 4

bostonmarathon
pray
prayer
marathon
boston
korban
run
runner

Topic 5

bombing
boston
bomb
terrorist
explosion
attack
cnn
wow

Topic 6

prayforboston
world
sick
people
sad
hurt
live
charity

Topic 7

prayforboston
stop
police
reason
terrify
stuff
guys
prayfortexas

Topic 8

prayforboston
eye
close
word
day
spread
save
stay

Topic 9

twitter
tweet
account
fake
google
bostonmarathon
retweet
finder

Topic 10

victim
marathon
tragedy
honor
boston
kindness
tonight
help
Top hashtags
#prayforboston275
#bostonmarathon126
#boston56
#bostonstrong8
#breaking7
#pray5
#manhunt4
#rip4
#watertown4
#wbz4
#13
#23
#bostonbombing3
#fbi3
#marathon3
#prayforgaza3
#rt3
#wanted3
#14mei19972
#bostonmanhunt2
Top emoji
🙏18
😔9
👣2
👼2
🔥2
😢2
🙌2
🇸1
🇺1
🏃1
👇1
👲1
💂1
💔1
💗1

Computed over the full corpus.

Record

Catalog key
crisislex-2013_Boston_bombings
Authors
Olteanu, Alexandra; Vieweg, Sarah; Castillo, Carlos
Year
2015
Source paper
What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises
DOI / arXiv
10.1145/2675133.2675242
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0)
Records
1,000
Text corpus
tweet text
Languages
en
Collected
2012-2013 (2010s)
Region
Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)

Provenance

Originally published at
https://crisislex.org/ link checked
Hosted copy
Mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-02, 8.6 MB across 2 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json.

How to cite

BibTeX

@misc{echo2026,
  title  = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
  author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://echo.directory},
  note   = {Syracuse University}
}

@inproceedings{olteanu2015expect,
  author    = {Olteanu, Alexandra and Vieweg, Sarah and Castillo, Carlos},
  title     = {What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises},
  year      = {2015},
  doi       = {10.1145/2675133.2675241},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM 2015 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing},
  series    = {CSCW '15},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address   = {Vancouver, BC, Canada}
}

APA

Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory

Olteanu, A., Vieweg, S., & Castillo, C. (2015). CrisisLex — 2013_Boston_bombings [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675242

MLA

Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.

Olteanu, Alexandra, et al. CrisisLex — 2013_Boston_bombings. 2015, doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675242.

BibTeX · RIS · CSL-JSON

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