Sophia B. Liu

Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation

Recent world-wide crisis events have drawn new attention to the role information communication technology (ICT) can play in warning and response activities. Drawing on disaster social science, we consider a critical aspect of post-impact disaster response that does not yet receive much information science research attention. Public participation is an emerging, large-scale arena for computer-mediated interaction that has implications for both informal and formal response. With a focus on persistent citizen communications as one form of interaction in this arena, we describe their spatial and temporal arrangements, and how the emerging information pathways that result serve different post-impact functions. However, command-and-control models do not easily adapt to the expanding data-generating and -seeking activities by the public. ICT in disaster contexts will give further rise to improvised activities and temporary organizations with which formal response organizations need to align.

Crisis in a Networked World

Crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created changes in disaster response that we are only beginning to understand. The University of Colorado is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and information and communications technology development in crisis informatics. This article reports on research that examines features of computer-mediated communication and information sharing activity during and after the April 16, 2007, crisis at Virginia Tech by members of the public. The authors consider consequences that these technology-supported social interactions have on emergency response and implications for methods in e-Social Science.

The New Cartographers: Crisis Map Mashups and the Emergence of Neogeographic Practice

Crisis situations are ripe for expansion of the neogeographer population and skill set. We qualitatively examine the design and creation of crisis map mashups to describe emergent neogeographic practices in this particular domain. We analyze the circumstances that led to their creation, data selection, and design choices vis-à-vis spatial and temporal information representation. We then discuss the implications of emergent neogeographic practice based on two case examples, which illustrate the merging of professional and participatory geotechnologies, and the opportunity a blending of the two provides for widespread cartographic literacy.

Unobtrusive but invasive: using screen recording to collect field data on computer-mediated interaction

We explored the use of computer screen plus audio recording as a methodological approach for collecting empirical data on how teams use their computers to coordinate work. Screen recording allowed unobtrusive collecting of a rich record of actual computer work activity in its natural work setting. The embedded nature of screen recording on laptops made it easy to follow the users mobility among various work sites. However, the invasiveness of seeing all of the users interactions with and through the computer raised privacy concerns that made it difficult to find people to agree to participate in this type of detailed study. We discuss measures needed to develop trust with the researchers to enable access to this rich, empirical data of computer usage in the field.

Promoting structured data in citizen communications during disaster response: an account of strategies for diffusion of the 'Tweak the Tweet' syntax

Abstract: ‘Tweak the Tweet’ is an idea for enabling citizen reporting via microblogs during crisis events. It instructs users of Twitter to tag and structure their messages to make them machine-readable using what is known as a microsyntax. This chapter describes efforts to deploy the Tweak the Tweet syntax during several crisis events in 2010. We describe how syntax, instructions, and the nature of such a campaign evolved within and across events, and share the insights gained about the use of structured data reporting during mass emergencies and disasters.

Heritage matters in crisis informatics: how information and communication technology can support legacies of crisis events

Abstract: Information and communication technologies increasingly enable the capture of experiences that result from disaster and mass emergency events. The social and cultural value of such traces, when collectively generated and shared across people and over time, can enhance or even dramatically change how we remember crises. By drawing from several disciplines concerned with digital heritage, and using investigations from three historically significant disasters, we offer an agenda for how information science and human-centered computing communities might conceptualize digital heritage as an emergent research effort in the crisis domain.

The living heritage of historic crises: curating the Bhopal disaster in the social media landscape

On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present. Elisa Giaccardi, Editor

Digital commemoration: surveying the social media revival of historical crises

Social media has facilitated coordination efforts to help save lives, but are people using social media after the emergency phase? To answer this question, the author conducted a study surveying the social media revival of 111 crisis events that occurred over the past 50 years to examine if social media is being used to commemorate historical crises. Quantitative and qualitative social media metrics on each event were collected to determine their social media presence. The findings show that people are using social media to sustain the living record of past crises as an attempt to prevent disasters and strengthen resilience to future crises. Technological and social hazards that occurred before the social media age tended to exhibit a higher social media presence than natural hazards. Also, the revival of past crises typically occurred when they were linked to recent crises that exhibited similar causes, effects, and vulnerabilities. Issues in the construction and implementation of the survey inform the development of sociotechnical systems designed to collect, manage, and analyze historical events through the cyberinfrastructure.