Traditional and social media are known to be of great benefit for crisis-and disaster communication. In the past majority of cases, however, these media have been collected, processed and analyzed separately. Previous research focused mostly on aspects of communication within a single medium and a single channel only (typically Twitter). Little work has been carried out on the investigation of cross-media communication and communication-patterns during such events. Consequently, individual corpora have been gathered for a single medium (typically a collection of tweets) and for a single language only (typically English). Subsequent processing is likewise often limited to the same single language. To arrive at a more complete picture of events, we argue that the different types of media should be combined and that the resulting cross-media as well as multimedia and multilingual approach will yield superior information and insights compared to approaches based on individual media only. We identify several key issues which merit further attention and investigation. Our interest lies primarily in the communication and -patterns arising before, during and following a disaster involving the full spectrum of media and diversity of languages and how to best link these to allow for effective and efficient crisis-communication and improved situational awareness to first responders.

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