Sarah Vieweg

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Institute of Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS)

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...

Millions of people use social media to share information during disasters and mass emergencies. Information available on social media, particularly in the early hours of an event when few other sources are available, can be extremely valuable for emergency responders and decision makers, helping them gain situational awareness and plan relief effor...

Current research demonstrates that when people engage in social photo sharing, they are mindful of how audiences perceive and interact with their photos. We extend this vein of inquiry to focus on photo sharing in the context of the Arab Gulf. We provide insight into how this activity is practiced in a region governed by strict adherence to cultura...

We explore the meaning of privacy from the perspective of Qatari nationals as it manifests in digital environments. Although privacy is an essential and widely respected value in many cultures, the way in which it is understood and enacted depends on context. It is especially vital to understand user behaviors regarding privacy in the digital spher...

Scholarly debate within the HCI community has acknowledged that the concepts of "online" and "offline" are merely handy descriptors for different environments and contexts. However, when it comes to designing technologies, this binary is still frequently invoked. In this workshop, our goal is to address what issues arise when we invoke this binary...

Recent research on automatic analysis of social media data during disasters has given insight into how to provide valuable and timely information to formal response agencies—and members of the public—in these safety-critical situations. For the most part, this work has followed a bottom-up approach in which data are analyzed first, and the target a...

The use of social media to communicate timely information during crisis situations has become a common practice in recent years. In particular, the one-to-many nature of Twitter has created an opportunity for stakeholders to disseminate crisis-relevant messages, and to access vast amounts of information they may not otherwise have. Our goal is to u...

'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...

The popular microblogging service Twitter hosts 160 million users who send almost one million 140-character messages (known as tweets) per day. In times of mass emergency, many use Twitter to gather and disperse information. With so many tweets sent at any given time, locating and organizing timely, useful information during these safety-critical s...

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...

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 increase...

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.

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...

We detail methods for entity span identification and entity class annotation of Twitter communications that take place during times of mass emergency. We present our motivation, method and preliminary results.

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...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) in emergency situations is a vast and unwieldy area of study that has recently caught the attention of the public as well as scholarly communities. In this paper, I explain my research on Twitter broadcasts during mass emergency events. I discuss preliminary empirical research and how it leads to theoretical un...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper, we argue that clustering WordNet senses into more coarse-grained groupings results in higher inter-annotator agreement and increased system performance. Clustering of verb senses involves examining syntactic and semantic features of verbs and arguments on a case-by-case basis rather than applying a strict methodology. Determining app...

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...