Elements of Crisis Informatics
Crisis Informatics is how people and organizations use technology and the data created through that use throughout the life cycle of a crisis. There are many elements of crisis informatics. I'd like to talk about a few of them by giving examples.
Public Response Agencies
The City of Chicago compiled a list of COVID-19 testing sites around the city that is updated regularly. The interactive map can be found here: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Health-Human-Services/COVID-19-Testing-Sites-Map/j2wj-wjrp
This was a response by a public agency to an ongoing crisis of a pandemic. One can use this map to find a location nearest testing location to them and as you scroll over the orange dots, contact information about the site will popup on your screen.
Information Communication Technology
CNN created a database on school shootings where they collected information from reports, phone calls to police, school websites and smaller databases. They took this information and analyzed it, turning it into a story. Take a look at "10 Years. 180 school shootings. 356 victims." The visuals used from analyzing the database really do tell a story.
Crisis Mapping
The below crisis map is taken from an article by Leysia Palen of the University of Colorado entitled, “Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World.” The visual depicts the timeline of online communications from the first 8 hours of the Virginia Tech school shooting from April of 2007. It is interesting to see how long it takes for the school to send out communications, and for the explosion of news articles stemming from information obtained by student online communications.
Information Sharing
In the paper, "Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events," Amanda Lee Hughes and Leysia Palen describe how the public used the social media platform to share information and communicate during crisis situations. Their research suggests that use of Twitter could "set a precedent for future use in emergency warning, response and recover situations."
Volunteerism
Along those same lines, Tweek the Tweet was developed as a way to help manage response to crisis. Kate Starbird talks more about this in her paper, "Digital Volunteerism During Disaster: Crowdsourcing Information Processing." Users of Twitter would take real time tweets and 'translate' them in a way that could be read and analyzed digitally. These people, named 'voluntweeters', added Tweek the Tweet syntax and tags to general user tweets during the crisis situation, thus getting the messages to groups that could support the emergency situation as it played out in real time.
All of these elements show how people can find the information during and after a given situation and use that data to be better able to plan and react more effectively to future situations.
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