In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Jeannette Sutton, who writes the informative Disaster Sociologist blog for the Emergency Management magazine website, has a post about last week’s Information Systems for Crisis and Response (ISCRAM) conference. She reports that the role of new media in emergencies received more attention this year:

In the past, social and information scientists seemed to be on the outer margins of the conference. This year, there were four sessions focusing on collaboration and social networking – many of which discussed the use of new media in disaster and crisis response, specifically examining the use of Twitter.

Sutton highlights four papers presented at the meeting “about how Twitter is actively used by members of the public on the ground”:

Twittering Tennessee: Distributed Networks and Collaboration Following a Technological Disaster (Jeannette Sutton, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs). This paper examined the use of Twitter following the Tennessee Valley Coalash disaster of 2008. Sutton describes the use of Twitter as a backchannel communication mechanism to alert the major media to the environmental devastation wrought on the Tennessee Valley; the distributed location of major Twitter stream contributors; the types of information shared following the toxic event; and the lack of participation at the local level among those most directly impacted, emergency management and public officials, and organizational representatives from the TVA.

Pass It On?: Retweeting in Mass Emergencies (Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen; University of Colorado at Boulder) This paper looked at the phenomenon of Retweeting (RT) on Twitter, identifying the kinds of information that is shared among Twitter users and how that information propagates over time. Using sophisticated data capture and visualization models, they depict the flow of information across a variety of information sectors and the RT process.

Tweak the Tweet: Leveraging Microblogging Proliferation with a Prescriptive Grammar to Support Citizen Reporting (Kate Starbird, University of Colorado at Boulder and Jeannie Stamberger, Carnegie Mellon University). Starbird explains a process identified at the Random Hacks of Kindness conference and tested during recent events such as the response to the Haiti earthquake, showing that syntax adoption for Twitterers could lead to machine readable text in the future. The caveat: training the everyday user to “tweak the tweet” is problematic without having champions who can model Tweet syntax in disaster and crises.

Microblogging for Citizen Communication: Examination of Twitter Use in Response to a 2009 Violent Crisis in Seattle, Washington (Thomas J. Heverin and Lisl Zach; Drexel University). Haverlin presented preliminary findings on the use of Twitter following the murder of four police officers in the Seattle region. He showed how members of the public used Twitter as a communication channel to share information on the event, the suspect, and the final hours leading to the suspect’s demise. His micro level analysis also examined how the crowd challenged unpopular opinions on Twitter and even worked to censor those who disagreed with the majority consensus.

The papers are not yet posted in their entirety but will soon be on the ISCRAM web page.