
Leysia PalenUniversity of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Department of Computer Science
Leysia Palen
Information and Computer Science
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Publications (116)
Anti-vaccine advocates have long engaged in a harmful and baseless campaign that ties infertility to vaccines. Preliminary analysis of a large, real-time data collection of Twitter posts that filtered for COVID-19 vaccine and fertility content revealed a surprising moment when, after the vaccines rolled out, anti-vaccine advocates made a new tie to...
In times of mass emergency, vast amounts of data are generated via computer-mediated communication (CMC) that are difficult to manually cull and organize into a coherent picture. Yet valuable information is broadcast, and can provide useful insight into time- and safety-critical situations if captured and analyzed properly and rapidly. We describe...
Risks associated with natural hazards such as hurricanes are increasingly communicated on social media. For hurricane risk communication, visual information products—graphics—generated by meteorologists and scientists at weather agencies portray forecasts and atmospheric conditions and are offered to parsimoniously convey predictions of severe stor...
This resource was created to support researchers who might be newly conducting
crisis informatics research in light of the pandemic of 2020. It also might support creation of new course syllabi on related topics. It has been produced by members of the crisis informatics research community in May 2020 to consolidate and organize the literature on in...
Temporal coordination endures as a central topic in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) because information systems still struggle to adequately support varying representations of time in the context of collaborations that areboth temporally and geographically dispersed. Moreover, the adaptive practices of these broadly dispersed groups are...
OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest Volunteered Geographic Information project in the world, is characterized both by its map as well as the active community of the millions of mappers who produce it. The discourse about participation in the OSM community largely focuses on the motivations for why members contribute map data and the resulting data qua...
Conveying uncertainty in information artifacts is difficult; the challenge only grows as the demand for mass communication through multiple channels expands. In particular, as natural hazards increase with changing global conditions, including hurricanes which threaten coastal areas, we need better means of communicating uncertainty around risks th...
Over the past 20 years, the practices of crisis preparedness, response, and recovery have become increasingly dependent on information and communication technology (ICT) to accomplish their work. More recently, crisis informatics has developed an analysis of these phenomena from social and computational perspectives. To further to assess the conseq...
This article investigates the dynamic ways that people communicate, assess, and respond as a weather threat evolves. It uses social media data, which offer unique records of what people convey about their real-world risk contexts. Twitter narratives from 53 people who were in a mandatory evacuation zone in a New York City neighborhood during Hurric...
This work propels social media research beyond the single post as the unit of analysis toward fuller treatment of interaction by making the construct of the conversation analytically available. We offer a method for constructing @reply conversations in Twitter to apprehend social media conversational features at scale. We apply this method to the h...
Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect...
This chapter surveys the rapid rise of social media in a range of disaster experiences, reviewing topics of citizen reporting, community-oriented computing, distributed problem solving, and digital volunteerism as forms of socio-technical innovation, as well as topics of situational awareness and veracity as opportunities and challenges that arise...
During the last few decades, scientific capabilities for understanding and predicting weather and climate risks have advanced rapidly. At the same time, technological advances, such as the Internet, mobile devices, and social media, are transforming how people exchange and interact with information. In this modern information environment, risk comm...
This paper reports on two years of ethnographic observation of the science and politics of flood risk in Colorado, as well as design research that examines citizen interaction with expert knowledge about flooding in the region. We argue that the 100-year floodplain standard that inform maps produced by the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (F...
Nepal was struck by two major earthquakes in April and May 2015 which gave rise to much media attention. Because of photographs' power to influence how people perceive significant events, we investigate how these disasters are represented visually through Twitter-shared images in three ways. First, we compare how geotagged image tweets are distribu...
Crisis informatics is a multidisciplinary field combining computing and social science knowledge of disasters; its central tenet is that people use personal information and communication technology to respond to disaster in creative ways to cope with uncertainty. We study and develop computational support for collection and sociobehavioral analysis...
When Hurricane Sandy swept over the US eastern seaboard in October 2012, it was the most tweeted about event at the time. However, some of the most affected areas were underrepresented in the social media conversation about Sandy. Here, we examine the hurricane-related experiences and behaviors shared on Twitter by residents of Far Rockaway, a New...
Disasters and their impacts have unavoidable spatial characteristics. As such, maps are necessary and omnipresent features of the information landscapes that surround and support disaster response. Professional and volunteer GIS services are increasingly in demand to support map-based information visualization during crises. This paper investigates...
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most widely used volunteer geographic information system. Although it is increasingly relied upon during humanitarian response as the most up-to-date, accurate, or accessible map of affected areas, the behavior of the mappers who contribute to it is not well understood. In this paper, we explore the work practices and int...
This paper presents findings from an interdisciplinary research effort studying community resilience in Boulder,
Colorado. Boulder is a progressive region with a history of environmental leadership. The area is currently in
the process of recovering from major flooding and has launched several new initiatives related to building longterm resilience...
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work to create a common digital map of the world. OSM embraces ideals of open data, and to that end innovates both socially and technically to develop practices and processes for coordinated operation. This paper provides a brief history of OSM and then, thro...
Human computation and crowd sourcing have become hot topics across several application domains. Indeed, some efforts have been directed toward emergency management to find ways to involve the public in disaster response. However, many tasks in disaster response can put the public in harm's way or introduce problems of liability. Furthermore, some h...
This ethnographic study reveals how expertise was sought, articulated and actuated across online and offline worlds to enable the evacuation of 38 horses from an isolated ranch in the mountainous region of Northern Colorado following a series of devastating flash floods in September 2013. The shared expertise within a loosely connected community of...
Hurricane Sandy wrought $6 billion in damage, took 162 lives, and displaced 776,000 people after hitting the US Eastern seaboard on October 29, 2012. Because of its massive impact, the hurricane also spurred a flurry of social media activity, both by the population immediately affected and by the globally convergent crowd. In this paper we explore...
This paper presents findings from an interdisciplinary research effort studying community resilience in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder is a progressive region with a history of environmental leadership. The area is currently in the process of recovering from major flooding and has launched several new initiatives related to building long- term resilien...
The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 catalyzed a nascent set of efforts in then-emergent “volunteer technology communities.” Among these was the response from OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-driven project that makes geospatial data free and openly available. Following the earthquake, remotely located volunteers rapidly mapped the affect...
Social media and other online communication tools are a subject of great interest in mass emergency response. Members of the public are turning to these solutions to seek and offer emergency information. Emergency responders are working to determine what social media policies should be in terms of their "public information" functions. We report on...
Engineering reconnaissance following an extreme event is critical in identifying the causes of infrastructure failure and minimizing such consequences in similar future events. Typically, however, much of the data about infrastructure performance and the progression of geological phenomena are lost during the event or soon after as efforts move to...
In an increasingly global society and on a planet experiencing effects of climate change, large-scale emergencies both instigated by humans and arising from nature can devastate human life and our tightly- woven social fabric. With a promise of improved warning and coordination, a prevailing hope is that information and communication technology (IC...
This ethnographic study of a Facebook Page founded on 28 October 2012 in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall reveals how on-line pet advocates--a large but loosely organized social movement--mobilized their ad hoc discretionary activities to more cooperative, organized work to assist numerous displaced pets. The investigation shows how in...
This chapter reports on the challenges and opportunities made possible by social media in the field of emergency management. First, we consider the emergency practitioner and the challenges they face when using social media: difficulties in verifying social media data, liability risks, information overload, and a lack of resources to manage social...
Crisis informatics is a field of research that investigates the use of computer-mediated communication---including social media---by members of the public and other entities during times of mass emergency. Supporting this type of research is challenging because large amounts of ephemeral event data can be generated very quickly and so must then be...
Humanity Road is a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response. The organization is entirely virtual, relying on ICT to both organize and execute its work of helping to inform the public on how to survive after disaster events. This paper follows the trajectory of Humanity Road from an emergent group to a formal non-profit...
'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 h...
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 disci...
Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are long-term, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine...
This paper examines microblogging information diffusion activity during the 2011 Egyptian political uprisings. Specifically, we examine the use of the retweet mechanism on Twitter, using empirical evidence of information propagation to reveal aspects of work that the crowd conducts. Analysis of the widespread contagion of a popular meme reveals int...
Events that include the 9/11 attacks, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina or the 2011 Sendai Earthquake have drawn attention to how individuals, organizations or societies can improve crisis preparedness, resilience and recovery. In all scenarios, collaboration between professional responders, public administrations, citizens is critical to response, and ne...
We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams'...
This work examines how the introduction of social media has affected the role of the Public Information Officer (PIO)—the public relations component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Through analysis of 25 PIO interviews, we examine the work practice of PIOs and find that social media expand not only the scope and type of PIO work...
We report on the use of a team of trusted digital volunteers during the 2011 Shadow Lake Fire that occurred in the US Pacific Northwest to extend the social media capacity of a Type I incident management team. In this case study, we outline the tools and processes used by this virtual team to coordinate their activities, monitor social media commun...
Social media tools, including the microblogging platform Twitter, have been appropriated during mass disruption events by those affected as well as the digitally-convergent crowd. Though tweets sent by those local to an event could be a resource both for responders and those affected, most Twitter activity during mass disruption events is generated...
This empirical study of "digital volunteers" in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake describes their behaviors and mechanisms of self-organizing in the information space of a microblogging environment, where collaborators were newly found and distributed across continents. The paper explores the motivations, resources, activities...
A Level-1 US trauma center introduced role-tags in their trauma resuscitation rooms to help team members identify respective medical functions, and to limit the number of people in the rooms to required staff only. We use this in situ experiment with a paper prototype to investigate the role-driven nature of coordination and to identify system requ...
This paper presents results from a video-based analysis of non-programmers' use of a new platform for end-user programming, the 3D Avatar Programming System (3DAPS). We use micro-ethnographic analytic methods to understand how learning about programming occurs. We discuss how the management of internal and external cognitive representations of 3D m...
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 decision making and assess it against the local circumstances they...
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...
The exchange of information during times of crisis/disaster has traditionally been the purview of public safety, the National Guard and other local, state or federal authorities. However, this model is undergoing a change with the availability of new mobile communications capabilities and the rise of social networking sites. The general public can...
We present a vision of the future of emergency management that better supports inclusion of activities and information from members of the public during disasters and mass emergency events. Such a vision relies on integration of multiple subfields of computer science, and a commitment to an understanding of the domain of application. It supports th...
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 informati...
We examine microblogged information generated during two different co-occurring natural hazards events in Spring 2009. Due to its rapid and widespread adoption, microblogging in emergency response is a place for serious consideration and experimentation for future application. Because microblogging is comprised of a set of practices shaped by a num...
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 tempo...
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 h...
This paper offers a descriptive account of Twitter (a micro-blogging service) across four high profile, mass convergence events—two emergency and two national security. We statistically examine how Twitter is being used surrounding these events, and compare and contrast how that behavior is different from more general Twitter use. Our findings sugg...
This paper examines online, widescale interaction during an emergency event of national interest. Widescale interaction describes the potential for broad, immediate, and varied participation that the conditions of online forums, and social networking sites in particular, increasingly allow. Here, we examine a group on a popular social networking si...
Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of...
The topic of emotion in computing is enjoying recent and growing attention. Such attention is problematic because, we argue, foregrounding emotion marks it as a subcomponent of interaction, which has the surprising consequence of reducing the importance of emotion’s function.
Emotion has come into vogue in reaction to the emphasis put on work, on e...
The living relationship between intangible and tangible forms of heritage, as well as natural and cultural heritage, is a situated one, always in place. Information and communications technology (ICT) is opening up new ways of experiencing and thinking about heritage by allowing for cross‐media interaction. By combining different media and technolo...
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 sociolo...
Opportunities for participation by members of the public are expanding the information arena of disaster. Social media supports "backchannel" communications, allowing for wide-scale interaction that can be collectively resourceful, self-policing, and generative of information that is otherwise hard to obtain. Results from our study of information p...
Wireless local area networks – or Wi-Fi networks – are proliferating in some societies. Our interest in this exploratory essay
is to illustrate how ostensibly free, publicly-accessible Wi-Fi requires users to apply conventional understandings of space
and place (particularly commercial spaces and places) as they make sense of some ambiguities about...
This chapter discusses, as an example of a resource in use, the Zephyr Help Instance as used at MIT. The Zephyr Help Instance is a chat-like system that allows users to ask questions and other users to answer. The Zephyr Help Instance has the social and technical affordances for continued use as socio-technical system in its environment of use and...
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 inst...
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...
Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of...
More attention is being paid to the develop- ment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that are sensitive to the needs of people in their homes. By studying mobile telephony in such settings, we contribute to this discussion by examining how behaviors and characteristics of family life shape and in turn are shaped by ICTs. We presen...
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 i...
Various online forums that emerged during the August, 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, the 2003 San Bernardino, CA wildfires, and in preparation for a possible avian flu pandemic, are discussed. Online forums, with the increasingly accessible Internet, have allowed people to cross geographical boundaries to share information and coordinate citizen-...
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...
In the last few years, teenagers have been on the forefront of adopting short message service (SMS), a mobile phone-based text messaging system, and instant messaging (IM), a computer-based text chat system. However, while teenage adoption of SMS had led to a series of studies examining the reasons for its popularity, IM use in the teenage populati...
We report on the results of an ethnographic study of how elders manage their medication with the objective of informing the de- sign of in-home assistive health technology to support "medication adherence." We describe the methods by which elders organize and remember to take their medication—methods that leverage a kind of distributed cognition. E...
We describe our research-its approach, results and products-on Danish emergency medical service (EMS) field or "pre-hospital" work in minor and major incidents. We discuss how commitments to participatory design and attention to the qualitative differences between minor and major incidents address challenges identified by disaster sociolo-gists whe...