Dharma Dailey

Social Media, Public Participation, and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

ABSTRACT This research examines how information about an oil spill, its impacts, and the use of dispersants to treat the oil, moved through social media and the surrounding Internet during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Using a collection of tweets captured during the spill, we employ a mixed-method approach including an in-depth qualitative analysis to examine the content of Twitter posts, the connections that Twitter users made with each other, and the links between Twitter content and the surrounding Internet. This article offers a range of findings to help practitioners and others understand how social media is used by a variety of different actors during a slow-moving, long-term, environmental disaster. We enumerate some of the most salient themes in the Twitter data, noting that concerns about health impacts were more likely to be communicated in tweets about dispersant use, than in the larger conversation. We describe the accounts and behaviors of highly retweeted Twitter users, noting how locals helped to shape the network and the conversation. Importantly, our results show the online crowd wanting to participate in and contribute to response efforts, a finding with implications for future oil spill response.

Journalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd

Widespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is disrupting traditional models of news production and distribution. In this rapidly changing media landscape, the role of the journalist is evolving. Our research examines how professional journalists within a rural community impacted by Hurricane Irene successfully negotiated a new role for themselves, transforming their journalistic practice to serve in a new capacity as leaders of an online volunteer community. We describe an emergent organization of media professionals, citizen journalists, online volunteers, and collaborating journalistic institutions that provided real-time event coverage. In this rural context, where communications infrastructure is relatively uneven, this ad hoc effort bridged gaps in ICT infrastructure to unite its audience. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for characterizing these information-sharing activities: the “human powered mesh network” extends the concept of a mesh network to include human actors in the movement of information. Our analysis shows how journalists played a key role in this network, and facilitated the movement of information to those who needed it. These findings also note a contrast between how HCI researchers are designing crowdsourcing platforms for news production and how crowdsourcing efforts are forming during disaster events, suggesting an alternative approach to designing for emergent collaborations in this context.

It's Raining Dispersants: Collective Sensemaking of Complex Information in Crisis Contexts

Addressing crises sometimes requires grappling with sophisticated technical or scientific content. To make sense of the BP DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill people had to grapple with uncertain and sometimes contentious, complex information. This empirical study shows that an emergent, connected crowd interacted to surface, share, question and discuss these complexities. While studies have observed collective sensemaking taking place via social media in other kinds of crises, this study extends our understanding of emergent crowd work as collective sensemaking where members of the public assemble and interpret evidence on complex topics in a crisis context, perhaps performing a kind emergent citizen science.

Social Media Seamsters: Stitching Platforms & Audiences into Local Crisis Infrastructure

This paper examines social media use after a tragic disaster in a rural community in the USA--the 2014 Oso Landslide. Drawing upon interviews with community members and digital traces from multiple platforms, we explore how affected locals, government responders and journalists utilized a broad range of social media in their work-assembling different platforms to meet the information needs of their audiences. We borrow the analytical lens of stitching suggested by Vertesi, which allows us to see where these infrastructural alignments are seamless vs. seamful-highlighting some of the emergent and persistent challenges for those responding to disasters with and through social media. We demonstrate how this work is extremely dynamic, as the technical affordances of these platforms and the evolving practices of users shape how crisis communication occurs. Simultaneously, the pervasive and in some places institutionalized use of these platforms across a wide range of local actors suggests they are performing as critical infrastructure during crisis response. This raises questions of what it means to have so much local crisis information work occurring through platforms that mediate from a distance.

Sharing food, gathering information: the context and visibility of community information work in a crisis event

This paper describes ICT use after a disaster, connecting the stories of various community responders and tracing their activities across sociotechnical networks. Drawing on contextual interviews and the digital record, we reveal how information work, food work, and emotional labor intersected. At the most superficial level, we find that many community responders continue to rely upon face-to-face communication and “real simple” technologies to coordinate their activities. This research also speaks to the visibility of community response work—offering a method for surfacing less visible work given the social complexities of a disaster. This approach provides a complementary perspective to research that relies solely on digital traces.

Data visualization for psychotherapy progress tracking

In this experience report, we recount how we designed and built data visualization tools for clinical decision making in psychotherapy. We describe how a combination of three factors enabled us to build a high-fidelity prototype within eight-weeks: 1) a multi-disciplinary team; 2) an agile methodology that incorporated participatory user-centered research into the design approach; and 3) a coherent conceptual framework for designing data visualization for decision making [1]. Elements of our approach and the lessons learned may be useful to others who must design tools to display multivariate data for users who work under tight time constraints and high cognitive loads, and whose skills using data visualization vary widely.

Democratizing Data Science: The Community Data Science Workshops and Classes

Nearly every published discussion of data science education begins with a reflection on an acute shortage in labor markets of professional data scientists with the skills necessary to extract business value from burgeoning datasets created by online communities like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This model of data science—professional data scientists mining online communities for the benefit of their employers—is only one possible vision for the future of the field. What if everybody learned the basic tools of data science? What if the users of online communities—instead of being ignored completely or relegated to the passive roles of data producers to be shaped and nudged—collected and analyzed data about themselves? What if, instead, they used data to understand themselves and communicate with each other? What if data science was treated not as a highly specialized set of skills but as a basic literacy in an increasingly data-driven world?

Crisis Informatics for Everyday Analysts: A Design Fiction Approach to Social Media Best Practices

The importance of social media usage during crisis has been well established in academic and practitioner communities. Yet, the promise of rendering insights from social media for responders in a consistent and reliable manner remains a challenge and accepted standards of practice have yet to emerge. Inspired by a May 2017 workshop consisting of 15 Crisis Informatics practitioners from 3 continents, we imagine a training curriculum aimed at developing the necessary skills to harness social media data during a crisis. We call the recipients of that training Crisis Informatics Research Technicians (CIRT). We offer this design fiction to stimulate a conversation among Crisis Informatics scholars, Human-Computer Interaction scholars, crisis response professionals, and the public on best practices, tools, limitations, and ethics of using social media to improve crisis response.

Beyond Official: Government Information Work through Personal Accounts

This research demonstrates how government information workers employed different communication strategies through social media after a mass-causality event. Effectively using social media for some government functions may blur the lines between official work and the personal boundaries of government workers, thus raising privacy concerns for government employees.

Addressing the Information Needs of Crisis-Affected Communities: The Interplay of Legacy Media and Social Media in a Rural Disaster

As networked information and communication technologies (ICTs) take an increasingly prominent role in crisis communication in disaster-affected communities, their position in the broad socio-technical infrastructure deserves closer inspection. The authors examine the interplay between traditional legacy media and ICTs, such as social media, to explore how they together, and separately, meet the information needs of disaster-affected communities. They specifically look at examples during Hurricane Irene in upstate New York.