In this chapter, we first review recent technological and social trends and their implications fo... more In this chapter, we first review recent technological and social trends and their implications for designing social participatory systems. We then outline major design issues when building these systems, and propose both avenues of exploration and the necessary infrastructure to conduct these inquiries on a large scale.
Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '11, 2011
Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogging services (e.g. Twitter), and content-shari... more Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogging services (e.g. Twitter), and content-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr) have introduced the opportunity for wide-scale, online social participation. Visibility of national and international priorities such as public health, political unrest, disaster relief, and climate change has increased, yet we know little about the benefits - and possible costs - of engaging in social
The need for quick, timely, and accurate information is critical in emergency events. During mass... more The need for quick, timely, and accurate information is critical in emergency events. During mass emergencies, people assemble information from both official and unofficial sources. As digital access expands, people will increasingly incorporate information from digital sources into ...
Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), 2008
On-line websites and applications are increasingly playing a role in disaster response and recove... more On-line websites and applications are increasingly playing a role in disaster response and recovery. Yet with the wide variety of on-line grassroots activities that occur in such situations, it can be difficult to make sense of them. In this paper, we describe on-line behavior as socially convergent activity, interpreting it within existing sociological understandings of behavior in disaster events. We discuss seven types of convergent behavior and give examples of on-line activities for each type. By seeing these activities ...
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Jun 14, 2010
This article reports on a set of studies of the use of Twitter, a popular microblogging service, ... more This article reports on a set of studies of the use of Twitter, a popular microblogging service, during the 2009 seasonal flood threat period to the Red River Valley whose river separates North Dakota and Minnesota in a region that extends across the US-Canadian border into the province of Manitoba [1, 2, 3].
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on E‐Social Science, 2007
Abstract. Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from ... more Abstract. Serious 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 (ICT) 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 real change in the sociology of disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem ...
Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), 2008
Eyewitness photography is increasingly playing a more significant role in disaster response and r... more Eyewitness photography is increasingly playing a more significant role in disaster response and recovery efforts. This research elaborates on the ways in which members of the public participate during times of disaster by closely examining the evolving role of a prominent photo-sharing website, Flickr, in events that have occurred since its launch in February 2004. We discuss features of Flickr's emerging evolutionary growth as a community forum for disaster-related grassroots activity based on the findings from our ...
Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), 2008
We report on the results of an investigation about the “informal,” public-side communications tha... more We report on the results of an investigation about the “informal,” public-side communications that occurred in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech (VT) Shooting. Our on-going research reveals several examples of on-line social interaction organized around the goal of collective problem-solving. In this paper, we focus on specific instances of this distributed problem-solving activity, and explain, using an ethnomethodological lens, how a loosely connected group of people can work together on ...
Crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations... more 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 ...
This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during... more This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media ...
We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North Amer... more We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were" on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during ...
Technology-mediated social participation systems can dramatically change the way science, governm... more Technology-mediated social participation systems can dramatically change the way science, government, healthcare, entertainment, and enterprise operate. Using research from several fields, we can learn how to design better TMSP systems and to better integrate lessons learned in practice back into theory.
Social networking sites (eg Facebook), microblogging services (eg Twitter), and content-sharing s... more Social networking sites (eg Facebook), microblogging services (eg Twitter), and content-sharing sites (eg YouTube and Flickr) have introduced the opportunity for wide-scale, online social participation. Visibility of national and international priorities such as public health, political unrest, disaster relief, and climate change has increased, yet we know little about the benefits-and possible costs-of engaging in social activism via social media. These powerful social issues introduce a need for scientific research into technology ...
We present the first release of EMTerms (Emergency Management Terms), the largest crisis-related ... more We present the first release of EMTerms (Emergency Management Terms), the largest crisis-related terminological resource to date, containing over 7,000 terms used in Twitter to describe various crises. This resource can be used by practitioners to search for relevant messages in Twitter during crises, and by computer scientists to develop new automatic methods for crises in Twitter.
The terms have been collected from a seed set of terms manually annotated by a linguist and an emergency manager from tweets broadcast during 4 crisis events. A Conditional Random Fields (CRF) method was then applied to tweets from 35 crisis events, in order to expand the set of terms while overcoming the difficulty of getting more emergency managers’ annotations.
The terms are classified into 23 information-specific categories, by using a combination of expert annotations and crowdsourcing. This article presents the detailed terminology extraction methodology, as well as final results.
In this chapter, we first review recent technological and social trends and their implications fo... more In this chapter, we first review recent technological and social trends and their implications for designing social participatory systems. We then outline major design issues when building these systems, and propose both avenues of exploration and the necessary infrastructure to conduct these inquiries on a large scale.
Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '11, 2011
Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogging services (e.g. Twitter), and content-shari... more Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogging services (e.g. Twitter), and content-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr) have introduced the opportunity for wide-scale, online social participation. Visibility of national and international priorities such as public health, political unrest, disaster relief, and climate change has increased, yet we know little about the benefits - and possible costs - of engaging in social
The need for quick, timely, and accurate information is critical in emergency events. During mass... more The need for quick, timely, and accurate information is critical in emergency events. During mass emergencies, people assemble information from both official and unofficial sources. As digital access expands, people will increasingly incorporate information from digital sources into ...
Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), 2008
On-line websites and applications are increasingly playing a role in disaster response and recove... more On-line websites and applications are increasingly playing a role in disaster response and recovery. Yet with the wide variety of on-line grassroots activities that occur in such situations, it can be difficult to make sense of them. In this paper, we describe on-line behavior as socially convergent activity, interpreting it within existing sociological understandings of behavior in disaster events. We discuss seven types of convergent behavior and give examples of on-line activities for each type. By seeing these activities ...
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Jun 14, 2010
This article reports on a set of studies of the use of Twitter, a popular microblogging service, ... more This article reports on a set of studies of the use of Twitter, a popular microblogging service, during the 2009 seasonal flood threat period to the Red River Valley whose river separates North Dakota and Minnesota in a region that extends across the US-Canadian border into the province of Manitoba [1, 2, 3].
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on E‐Social Science, 2007
Abstract. Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from ... more Abstract. Serious 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 (ICT) 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 real change in the sociology of disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem ...
Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), 2008
Eyewitness photography is increasingly playing a more significant role in disaster response and r... more Eyewitness photography is increasingly playing a more significant role in disaster response and recovery efforts. This research elaborates on the ways in which members of the public participate during times of disaster by closely examining the evolving role of a prominent photo-sharing website, Flickr, in events that have occurred since its launch in February 2004. We discuss features of Flickr's emerging evolutionary growth as a community forum for disaster-related grassroots activity based on the findings from our ...
Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), 2008
We report on the results of an investigation about the “informal,” public-side communications tha... more We report on the results of an investigation about the “informal,” public-side communications that occurred in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech (VT) Shooting. Our on-going research reveals several examples of on-line social interaction organized around the goal of collective problem-solving. In this paper, we focus on specific instances of this distributed problem-solving activity, and explain, using an ethnomethodological lens, how a loosely connected group of people can work together on ...
Crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations... more 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 ...
This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during... more This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media ...
We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North Amer... more We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were" on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during ...
Technology-mediated social participation systems can dramatically change the way science, governm... more Technology-mediated social participation systems can dramatically change the way science, government, healthcare, entertainment, and enterprise operate. Using research from several fields, we can learn how to design better TMSP systems and to better integrate lessons learned in practice back into theory.
Social networking sites (eg Facebook), microblogging services (eg Twitter), and content-sharing s... more Social networking sites (eg Facebook), microblogging services (eg Twitter), and content-sharing sites (eg YouTube and Flickr) have introduced the opportunity for wide-scale, online social participation. Visibility of national and international priorities such as public health, political unrest, disaster relief, and climate change has increased, yet we know little about the benefits-and possible costs-of engaging in social activism via social media. These powerful social issues introduce a need for scientific research into technology ...
We present the first release of EMTerms (Emergency Management Terms), the largest crisis-related ... more We present the first release of EMTerms (Emergency Management Terms), the largest crisis-related terminological resource to date, containing over 7,000 terms used in Twitter to describe various crises. This resource can be used by practitioners to search for relevant messages in Twitter during crises, and by computer scientists to develop new automatic methods for crises in Twitter.
The terms have been collected from a seed set of terms manually annotated by a linguist and an emergency manager from tweets broadcast during 4 crisis events. A Conditional Random Fields (CRF) method was then applied to tweets from 35 crisis events, in order to expand the set of terms while overcoming the difficulty of getting more emergency managers’ annotations.
The terms are classified into 23 information-specific categories, by using a combination of expert annotations and crowdsourcing. This article presents the detailed terminology extraction methodology, as well as final results.
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The terms have been collected from a seed set of terms manually annotated by a linguist and an emergency manager from tweets broadcast during 4 crisis events. A Conditional Random Fields (CRF) method was then applied to tweets from 35 crisis events, in order to expand the set of terms while overcoming the difficulty of getting more emergency managers’ annotations.
The terms are classified into 23 information-specific categories, by using a combination of expert annotations and crowdsourcing. This article presents the detailed terminology extraction methodology, as well as final results.
The terms have been collected from a seed set of terms manually annotated by a linguist and an emergency manager from tweets broadcast during 4 crisis events. A Conditional Random Fields (CRF) method was then applied to tweets from 35 crisis events, in order to expand the set of terms while overcoming the difficulty of getting more emergency managers’ annotations.
The terms are classified into 23 information-specific categories, by using a combination of expert annotations and crowdsourcing. This article presents the detailed terminology extraction methodology, as well as final results.