Sinna Lindquist

Using video prototyping as a means to involve crisis communication personnel in the design process: innovating crisis management by creating a social media awareness tool

Social media is increasingly used for all kinds of everyday communication, with vast amounts of user-generated content being continuously generated and published. The data provides a new form of information source that can be exploited for obtaining additional knowledge regarding a subset of the population. Although it might be difficult to organize and assess individual text fragments, valuable insights contributing to the overall situational awareness can also be gained through acquiring social media texts and analyzing statistical properties in the data in near real-time. One such avenue of approach which is currently being developed is to analyze the text content linguistically and extract measures regarding the overall feelings and attitudes that people express in relation to an ongoing crisis. To make use of this kind of new information requires the algorithms and the resulting statistics to be designed and presented according to operational crisis management needs. In this paper, we describe the involvement of crisis management stakeholders in a series of user-centered activities in order to understand the needs, and design a useful tool. In particular, video prototyping has been used as method for quickly capturing a first explicit design idea based on real life experience, that could later be used for further generalization and tool design.

Informing crisis alerts using social media: Best practices and proof of concept

Social media has become an integrated part of human communication, both as a means to establish and maintain social relationships, and as a means of sharing and co-creating information. Social media comes with an array of possibilities for individuals as well as organizations, corporations, and authorities. Within the field of crisis communication, social media possibilities such as online sharing and social networking have had an impact on the way crisis information is disseminated and updated. This paper addresses the issues related to using social media for communicating crisis information and broadcasting alert messages to the general population, discusses the role of social media in future pan-European crisis alerting, and presents a prototype system demonstrating the possibilities. An extensive systematic literature review was carried out to identify factors that affect the use of social media for alerting and warning. These factors were mirrored in experiences, collected through interviews, obtained by emergency management organizations in three European countries (Sweden, Czech Republic, and Spain). The factors finally form the basis for suggestions and recommendations regarding the design of technological tools for both communication and information collection to serve as an integral part of a future pan-European crisis alerting system.

Automatic detection of xenophobic narratives: A case study on Swedish alternative media

In this work we use text analysis to analyze communication on a set of Swedish immigration critic alternative media sites. Our analysis is focused on detecting narratives containing xenophobic and conspiratorial stereotypes. We are also interested in identifying differences in emotional tone and pronoun use in a comparison with traditional media. For our analysis we have used the text analysis tool LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and a set of dictionaries made to capture a xenophobic narrative. The results show that there are significant differences between regular media and immigration critic alternative media when it comes to the use of narratives and also in the emotional tone and pronoun use.