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Sharing Radiation Measurements Through Social Media: A Methodological User-Oriented Proposal Set of Guidelines
Abstract
Radiation measurements are key information for risk communication in post-nuclear accident situations. Among the different social media platforms, Twitter offers automated accounts which have been used to share the readings, but often in an incomplete way from the perspective of data sharing and risk communication between citizen and radiation experts. In this paper, the authors investigate the requirements for radiation measurements, by analysing the perceived usefulness of several metadata items that may go along the measurement itself. They carried out a benchmark of existing usages, and conducted a survey with both experts and lay citizens. They thus produced a set of guidelines regarding the metadata that should be used. Furthermore, they created a prototype of a software tool to publish complete measurements and metadata containing suitable information for both experts and citizen based on the requirements.
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The collective practices of investing and building do-it-yourself (DIY) tools for radiation
monitoring demonstrate a whole new dimension of citizen empowerment and mobilization after a disaster by involving new actors, such as so-called Hackerspaces. The DIY Geiger counters and other post-Fukushima humanitarian tools introduce prototype building as a type of collective and political action driven by the ideal of a resilient, post-apocalyptic citizenship. These tools and communities organized around participatory monitoring of radiation pose constructive participatory governance
lessons for more effective disaster management in the future.
The readability of text documents has been studied from a linguistic perspective long before people began to regularly communicate via Internet technologies. Typically, such studies look at books or articles containing many paragraphs and pages. However, the readability of short messages comprising a few sentences, common on today's social networking sites and microblogging services, has received less attention from researchers working on "readability". Emergency management specialists, crisis response practitioners, and scholars have long recognized that clear communication is essential during crises. To the best of our knowledge, the work we present here is the first to study the readability of crisis communications posted on Twitter-by governments, non-governmental organizations, and mainstream media. The data we analyze is comprised of hundreds of tweets posted during 15 different crises in English-speaking countries, which happened between 2012 and 2013. We describe factors which negatively affect comprehension, and consider how understanding can be improved.
Based on our analysis and observations, we conclude with several recommendations for how to write brief crisis messages on social media that are clear and easy to understand.
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 sociologically informed research and information and communications technology development in crisis informatics. This article reports on research that examines features of computer-mediated communication and information sharing activity during and after the April 16, 2007, crisis at Virginia Tech by members of the public. The authors consider consequences that these technology-supported social interactions have on emergency response and implications for methods in e-Social Science.
The focus of this paper is on demonstrating how a model of the diffusion of actionable information can be used to study information cascades on Twitter that are in response to an actual crisis event, and its concomitant alerts and warning messages from emergency managers. We will: identify the types of information requested or shared during a crisis situation; show how messages spread among the users on Twitter including what kinds of information cascades or patterns are observed; and note what these patterns tell us about information flow and the users. We conclude by noting that emergency managers can use this information to either facilitate the spreading of accurate information or impede the flow of inaccurate or improper messages.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima: An analysis of traditional and new media coverage of nuclear accidents and radiation
Sharon M. Friedman
Abstract
The Internet made an enormous amount of information on Fukushima available, far more than was provided by the media during the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents. While journalists contributed much of the news about Fukushima, citizens actively participated in blogs and on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, exchanging views and directing others to important news articles or videos. The Internet also gave the traditional media many opportunities for better coverage, with more space for articles and the ability to publish interactive graphics and videos. Coverage in The New York Times, for example, included an abundance of background and explanatory information about the Fukushima accident and radiation releases in multiple formats and gave readers the opportunity to better understand technical information. Consequently, radiation coverage of the Fukushima accident was better than that of the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl accidents. Television reporting, however, still presented some problems.
In this article we explore the behavior of Twitter users under an emergency situation. In particular, we analyze the activity related to the 2010 earthquake in Chile and characterize Twitter in the hours and days following this disaster. Furthermore, we perform a pre-liminary study of certain social phenomenons, such as the dissem-ination of false rumors and confirmed news. We analyze how this information propagated through the Twitter network, with the pur-pose of assessing the reliability of Twitter as an information source under extreme circumstances. Our analysis shows that the propa-gation of tweets that correspond to rumors differs from tweets that spread news because rumors tend to be questioned more than news by the Twitter community. This result shows that it is posible to detect rumors by using aggregate analysis on tweets.
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 qualitative study of 29 groups across six disasters over Flickr's nearly three-year lifespan. Our findings discuss efforts toward the development of norms that attempt to guide the nature of social practice around photographic content during disaster response and recovery efforts.
Message data has, as yet, not been adopted by large-scale, international humanitarian relief organizations in an instrumental fashion. While the largest of these organizations have adopted messaging as part of their Public Relations functions, few have used any form of message data originating in the field, at the time of disaster. The message data being contributed by bystanders and those affected by a disaster, as it is happening, has largely been deemed as unverifiable and untrustworthy, and thus construed as unsuitable for incorporation into established mechanisms for organizational decision-making. In this paper, we describe the discursive barriers to the use of microblogged data by Humanitarian NGOs during times of disaster. We present data and findings from a study involving representatives from thirteen humanitarian organizations. Our analysis suggests that the organizational barriers, both in terms of function and structure, and the data itself, form barriers to organizational use of microblogged data. We propose three socio-technical solutions to surpassing adoption bottlenecks, namely bounded microblogging, microblogged data as contextual data, and/or use of computational solutions.
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 emergencies using information extraction (IE) techniques.
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 and products of digital volunteers. It describes how seemingly small features of the technical environment offered structure for self-organizing, while considering how the social-technical milieu enabled individual capacities and collective action. Using social theory about self-organizing, the research offers insight about features of coordination within a setting of massive interaction.
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 suggest that Twitter messages sent during these types of events contain more displays of information broadcasting and brokerage, and we observe that general Twitter use seems to have evolved over time to offer more of an information-sharing purpose. We also provide preliminary evidence that Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a mass convergence or emergency event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.
The significance of the temporal dimension of situation awareness is examined. Its study requires the staging of complex dynamic situations and the development of less intrusive in-flight probing techniques to assess the pilot's ability to adequately and rapidly retrieve and integrate flight-related information. The cognitive basis of the concept is analyzed, embedding it in the context of related psychological concepts. Methodological approaches to the investigation of situation awareness are discussed on this basis.
Written as a tool for both researchers and communication managers, the Handbook of Crisis Communication is a comprehensive examination of the latest research, methods, and critical issues in crisis communication. Includes in-depth analyses of well-known case studies in crisis communication, from terrorist attacks to Hurricane Katrina. Explores the key emerging areas of new technology and global crisis communication. Provides a starting point for developing crisis communication as a distinctive field research rather than as a sub-discipline of public relations or corporate communication
This paper focuses on the micro-blogging service Twitter, looking at source credibility for information shared in relation to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan. We look at the sources, credibility, and between-language differences in information shared in the month following the disaster. Messages were categorized by user, location, language, type, and credibility of information source. Tweets with reference to third-party information made up the bulk of messages sent, and it was also found that a majority of those sources were highly credible, including established institutions, traditional media outlets, and highly credible individuals. In general, profile anonymity proved to be correlated with a higher propensity to share information from low credibility sources. However, Japanese-language tweeters, while more likely to have anonymous profiles, referenced low-credibility sources less often than non-Japanese tweeters, suggesting proximity to the disaster mediating the degree of credibility of shared content.
The Japanese government tweeted to calm public fear, as the public generally listened to tweets expressing alarm.
Information is presented concerning the public information chronology; Met Ed public relations; flow of public information during the accident at Three Mile Island; flow of public information on five key events during the accident at Three Mile Island; the journalist's perspective; content analysis of mass media coverage of the accident; local radio news coverage of the accident; and qualitative survey of newspaper coverage of the accident.
Research on the use of social media during disaster events has gained attention in recent years. Prior research paid attention to warnings, response activities and the dissemination of information through social media during times of crisis. This study focuses on the use of social media during crisis from different perspectives. In this paper, the implications of symbols that emerged in YouTube videos were examined. Social media can be a valuable medium immediately after disaster events for people in crisis and for others who are indirectly affected to seek spiritual and emotional support and to reconstruct their cultural value system and identity. This study also addresses that persistence and replay are crucial attributes in the design of social media tools for users to seek emotional support and to engage with others in larger space and time.
Tsunami warning systems (TWS) are global systems designed to monitor seismological and tidal stations, to evaluate earthquakes with tsunami potential, and to disseminate tsunami warning information. In the wake of the spate of recent tsunami-related events, and consequent loss of lives, and economic and environmental damage, we consider lessons learned from other large-scale safety-critical systems where failure is not an option. We begin by describing the technical (dry), social, organizational and cultural (wet) elements of today's tsunami warning systems. We then consider the nature of high reliability organizations, and their characteristics en route to identifying lessons learned from these systems that offer new insights about the design, operation, structure and performance of next generation tsunami warning systems. We conclude with an agenda for future work and concepts for follow-on research.
This volume is a complete guide to carrying out your own structural equation modelling (SEM) project. Assuming no previous experience of the subject, and a minimum of mathematical knowledge, this is the ideal guide for those new to SEM. Each chapter begins with learning objectives, and ends with a list of the new concepts introduced and questions to open up further discussion. Exercises for each chapter, including the necessary data, can be downloaded from the book's website. Helpful real life examples are included throughout, drawing from a wide range of disciplines including psychology, political science, marketing and health.
Introduction to Structural Equation Modelling using SPSS and AMOS provides engaging and accessible coverage of all the basics necessary for using SEM, making it an invaluable companion for students taking introductory SEM courses in any discipline. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Highlights►Web mashup system helps people and professionals to quickly retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. ►We identify four dimensions: spatial, temporal, collaborative and situational that are common to mashups systems for emergencies. ►We use the four dimensions to design a web mashup for being as effective as possible a system enabling back-channels communications during emergencies. ►Specialized tools such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools and storyboarding authoring demonstrate to be effective for quick information retrieving in web emergency management systems.
This article explores how mapping mashup can trigger and shape the public involvement during an online controversy. It suggests to depart from merely focusing on the maps’ impact to rather analyse their specific affordances in shaping the public engagement. This interrelation between maps and public can be analysed in the online debate about radiation levels in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear event in March 2011: various maps were created in order to provide alternative views of the radiation situation. This case study provides the opportunity to analyse how citizens gathered online to fulfill the various steps in radiation mapmaking; the various steps in this process were reconstituted by interviewing the main actors and by using a Web Crawler. Once this interrelation between the public and maps is clarified, the affordances of mapping mashup are characterized by their belonging to digital culture.
Key Definitions for CrisisCrisis Management ProcessGeneral Nature of Crisis Communication ResearchCrisis Communication: Overview and HistoryConclusion
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