Manuela Farinosi

Situational awareness in smart environments: socio-mobile and sensor data fusion for emergency response to disasters

Abstract Traditional situational awareness services in disaster management are mainly focused on the institutional warning response and not fully exploit the active participation of citizens involved. This paper presents an advanced system for emergency management (ASyEM) which fuses the potentiality offered by mobile social data and bottom-up communication with smart sensors. The proposed architecture model is organized into four different layers: (1) sensor, (2) local transmission, (3) network and (4) management. ASyEM is able to capture and aggregate two different kind of data: (a) user generated content produced by citizens during or immediately after the disaster and shared online through socio-mobile applications and (b) data acquired by smart sensors distributed on the environment (i.e., intelligent cameras, microphones, acoustic arrays, etc.). Data are selected, analysed, processed and integrated in order to increase the reliability and the efficiency of whole situational awareness services, localize the critical areas and obtain in this way some relevant information for emergency response and completion of search and rescue operations.

Challenging mainstream media, documenting real life and sharing with the community: An analysis of the motivations for producing citizen journalism in a post-disaster city

The aim of this article is to explore the motivations that drove many ordinary people to produce citizen journalism after the earthquake that destroyed the Italian city of L’Aquila in 2009. Using in-depth interviews, we investigate the motivations and the obstacles underlying the publication of grassroots information related to the post-earthquake situation. Findings highlight that people were largely motivated to upload their content online: (1) to contrast the quake-related news provided by Italian mainstream media with their own perceptions; (2) to document their lives and the ‘real situation’ of the city; and (3) to share their points of view with other citizens trying to re-establish online the ties broken offline because of the catastrophe. Analysis shows that these non-professional journalists also had to face a series of obstacles, such as risks of fragmentation and lack of professionalism, funding and visibility.

Print and online newspapers as material artefacts

Traditional newspaper journalism is in a state of crisis and there have been several attempts to overcome this. Many discourses have reiterated the triumphal march of a digital revolution in newspaper journalism and anticipated the end of the print newspaper. This moment calls for an in-depth analysis of reader habits of news consumption and use in order to understand the audiences for journalistic output and their relationship with the journalistic objects. In this study, we adopt a multi-method approach, integrating (1) qualitative content analysis of student essays dealing with the physicality of printed and online newspapers, (2) ethnographic observation of the use practices of readers and (3) expert interview. The findings show that informants perceive print and online newspapers as objects with which they have a different experience and highlight the need to develop bridging strategies combining print and digital media in order to overcome the crisis facing printed news media.

A Smart Visual Information Tool for Situational Awareness

In the last years, social media have grown in popularity with millions of users that everyday produce and share online digital content. This practice reveals to be particularly useful in extra-ordinary context, such as during a disaster, when the data posted by people can be integrated with traditional emergency management tools and used for event detection and hyperlocal situational awareness. In this contribution, we present SVISAT, an innovative visualization system for Twitter data mining, expressly conceived for signaling in real time a given event through the uploading and sharing of visual information (i.e., photos). Using geodata, it allows to display on a map the wide area where the event is happening, showing at the same time the most popular hashtags adopted by people to spread the tweets and the most relevant images/photos which describe the event

The Big Meaning of Small Messages: The Use of WhatsApp in Intergenerational Family Communication.

This study explores the use of WhatsApp instant messenger in extended families in two countries, Finland and Italy, that represent different family and communication cultures. Qualitative research material was collected in 2014/2015 from families consisting of three or more generations and living either in the same or different households. A directed approach to qualitative content analysis was applied in the analysis of the research data. The results of the study show that WhatsApp is considered to facilitate family interaction across generations. The success of WhatsApp in the family context accounts for two main factors: first, for the possibility to reach the whole family at once; and secondly, for its capacity to promote “phatic communion” via small messages. While utilizing various communicative modalities of WhatsApp (text and voice messages, photos, videos), family members take into account others’ preferences and communication skills.

Shaken and stirred: Social representations, social media, and community empowerment in emergency contexts

Abstract In this paper we examine the use of Twitter and Facebook in two dramatic earthquakes that hit Italy: L’Aquila (in 2009) and Emilia (in 2012). Indeed, disasters disrupt everyday life and engage people in meaning-making processes aimed at recovering meaning and control of their world. In these cases, we argue that the use of social media may contribute to social representations processes and functions: cognitive coping, social sharing of emotions, preserving self-efficacy, boosting identity, and community empowerment. Different methods were adopted to examine the use of social media in the immediate aftermath, a few days after, and in the medium-long term. Differences between the events, combined with the differences between Twitter and Facebook, entailed a multiplicity of uses. Nevertheless, the analyses point to the same conclusions: by fostering new forms of communication and encounters, social media played an increasingly important role during and after the earthquakes. First, they were used for providing information and material coping, then they favored the social sharing of emotions and joint remembering, and finally they contributed to claiming voice and control. Results thus suggest that the use of social media favored different representational functions, which progressively contributed to community empowerment.

Knitting Feminist Politics: Exploring a Yarn-Bombing Performance in a Postdisaster City:

The aim of this article is to explore urban knitting as a worldwide social movement, rather than solely a kind of “inoffensive urban graffiti” made with knitted fabric. Building on the available literature and original research, the article argues that this movement weaves together elements from craftivism, domesticity, handicraft, art, and feminism. It then explores a specific urban knitting initiative, called “Mettiamoci una pezza” (“Let’s patch it”), carried out in L’Aquila, Italy, 3 years after the earthquake that devastated the city in 2009. To analyze the sociopolitical aspects of this initiative, a series of qualitative research studies was conducted over time, to which were added semistructured interviews with the initiative’s local organizers. The findings show that the initiative in L’Aquila clearly exhibits the five original features of the urban knitting movement that emerge from the literature as being characteristic of this movement.

Geolocating the Past: Online Memories after the L’Aquila Earthquake

Since the early ‘90s, the widespread adoption of digital media has had a profound impact on the form, content and ways of distribution of individual and collective memories. The new ICTs and the internet have exponentially increased and facilitated sharing, storing and retrieving data, experiences and memories. Social platforms provide space for voices that would not reach the broader public through traditional mainstream media, offering a unique opportunity to understand a certain event from a non-institutional point of view, and in this way, challenging the hegemonic narratives of the past.

#decadenza su Twitter: un caso di naming e shaming online?

La diffusione delle piattaforme social ha portato profondi cambiamenti nelle modalita di interazione tra individui e societa, dando origine a nuove pratiche e nuovi territori di discussione collettiva e ampliando gli spazi di interazione e formazione di opinioni. In questo contributo l’attenzione sara focalizzata su un caso specifico: la decadenza di Berlusconi dal ruolo di Senatore. Attraverso l’analisi quali-quantitativa di 1.500 tweet contrassegnati dall’hashtag #decadenza, saranno ricostruite le caratteristiche di un modo particolare di essere parte del dibattito politico di un Paese, soffermandosi nello specifico sull’uso degli hashtag e dei retweet e sulla sentiment analysis dei contenuti.

Beyond the panopticon framework: privacy, control and user generated content

The overall purpose of this contribution is to explore the meaning and significance of the terms control and privacy in the light of the intensive diffusion of user generated content (UGC). Every day a large number of people all over the world use digital media to share personal details with a vast network of friends and, often, with an unspecified number of strangers producing long lasting digital information. My exploratory analysis is based on 145 compositions written by students from Udine University (aged between 19 and 27). The data from the texts were content-analysed and were then categorized and analysed from a qualitative point of view to understand how young people frame the topic of privacy on the Web. The results show that it is possible to identify ten macrocategories: Privacy, Participation and Sharing, Visibility, Persistence, Replicability and Searchability, Exhibitionism, Risks, Horizontal Control, Invisible Audiences, Vertical Control, Protection, Distrust.