This paper discusses the design of a social media crisis mapping platform for decision making in natural disasters where tweets are analysed to achieve situational awareness during earthquake and tsunami events. A qualitative end user evaluation is undertaken on our first prototype system to get feedback from practitioners working in the field of hazard detection and early warning. Participatin...

This article presents the digital archive #greekdocs, a researcher-initiated practice. This work has both a theoretical and a practical aim. Theoretically, it critically analyses and situates alternative media such as independent documentaries within media ecology in times of austerity and argues that in the context of Greek austerity these operate as both journalist and activist practice. Prac...

The extensive use of social media platforms, especially during disasters, creates unique opportunities for humanitarian organizations to gain situational awareness and launch relief operations accordingly. In addition to the textual content, people post overwhelming amounts of imagery data on social networks within minutes of a disaster hit. Studies point to the importance of this online imager...

In the past crisis sensemaking activities have primarily been controlled by professional emergency responders and the media. Social media, however, has the potential to see a shift towards more grassroots and ad hoc citizen engagement. This paper sets out our vision and our progress in implementation of a new online platform called ‘Majority Report’, which aims to empower citizen sensemaking ac...

The use of social media in a crisis has been applauded, and is witnessing an increase in uptake among those involved in crisis management activities, including citizens. Whilst some challenges have been discussed elsewhere, somewhat lacking is a discussion on the impact of sharing information on the security of those that may have been recorded. Accordingly, this working paper aims to provide p...

Crisis memes are the ghoulish and satirical posts that spread through social media concurrently with serious journalistic reportage. They are folk productions that respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates of popular online image macros. This article explores how templatability is relevant to the underpinnings, development, structure and value of crisis memes. The...

Research has shown that an adverse security event such as a security breach negatively affects stock price and market valuation of the company. Such events result in substantial loss of reputation and engenders negative corporate image in company’s stakeholders. Under such crises, literature has demonstrated that companies devise crisis response strategies to counter the negative effects of the...

In a highly connected world, information coming from different media sources and social relationships are more quickly disseminated than ever before. Natural disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan capture attention globally. Investigations of how people respond to the credibility of different sources have implications for policy making and information systems design. In this paper, we studied how dif...

This article presents the digital archive #greekdocs, a researcher-initiated practice. This work has both a theoretical and a practical aim. Theoretically, it critically analyses and situates alternative media such as independent documentaries within media ecology in times of austerity and argues that in the context of Greek austerity these operate as both journalist and activist practice. Prac...

Social media are ubiquitous in modern society. Among their uses are to provide real-time information during crisis. One might expect that emergency management agencies in the U.S. make use of social media extensively to disseminate and collect crisis information as that is where the information flows most freely and quickly; yet, these agencies are not fully exploiting the capabilities of socia...