Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Informatics: User Expectations and Design Principles for Social Media and Mobile Apps

Description

Marc-André Kaufhold explores user expectations and design implications for the utilization of new media in crisis management and response. He develops a novel framework for information refinement, which integrates the event, organisational, societal, and technological perspectives of crises. Therefore, he reviews the state of the art on crisis informatics and empirically examines the use, potentials and barriers of both social media and mobile apps. Based on these insights, he designs and evaluates ICT concepts and artifacts with the aim to overcome the issues of information overload and quality in large-scale crises, concluding with practical and theoretical implications for technology adaptation and design.  Foreword Acknowledgements Abstract Zusammenfassung My Contribution Publications of the Author Contents Abbreviations List of Figures List of Tables Part I Outline 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation 1.2 Aims and Objectives 1.3 Structure of the Work 2 Related Work 2.1 Foundations and Terms of Crisis Management 2.2 Research Domain and Technologies of Crisis Informatics 2.3 Adoption of Social Media Analytics in Crisis Informatics 2.4 Towards Information Refinement in Crisis Informatics 2.5 Research Gaps and Potentials 3 Research Design 3.1 Research Field and Foundations 3.2 Research Approach 3.3 Research Context 3.4 Methods 3.4.1 Theoretical Review 3.4.2 Empirical Pre-Study 3.4.3 Design of Artefacts 3.4.4 Evaluation Part II Theoretical and Empirical Findings 4 Retrospective Review and Future Directions for Crisis Informatics 4.1 Introduction and Brief History 4.2 Published Cases of Social Media in Emergencies 4.3 Usage Patterns—Types of Interaction in Social Media 4.3.1 Citizens to Citizens (C2C)—Self-Coordination and Help 4.3.2 Authorities to Citizens (A2C)—Crisis Communication and Public Alerting 4.3.3 Citizens to Authorities (C2A)—Integration of Citizen-Generated Content 4.3.4 Authorities to Authorities (A2A)—Inter- and Intra-Organizational Crisis Management 4.4 Role Patterns—Types of Users in Social Media 4.4.1 Citizens; or Public Perspective 4.4.2 Authorities; or Organizational Perspective 4.4.3 Towards a Classification of Roles Related to Social Media Use 4.5 Perception Patterns—Views on Social Media 4.5.1 Authorities’ Perception of Social Media 4.5.2 Citizens’ Perception on Social Media 4.5.3 Towards Comprehensive Perception Patterns 4.6 The Past and the Future: Discussion and Conclusion 4.6.1 Achievements of 15 Years of Research 4.6.2 Future Practice and Research Potentials 5 Survey on Media Perception and Use During Infrastructure Failure 5.1 Introduction 5.2 State of the Art 5.2.1 Characteristics of Socio-technical Critical Infrastructures 5.2.2 Crisis Communication and Requirements for ICT 5.2.3 Research Gap 5.3 Methodology 5.3.1 Study Participants 5.3.2 Data Analysis 5.4 Results 5.4.1 Media Usage During Crises 5.4.2 Expectations Towards Critical Infrastructure Operators in Crises 5.4.3 Measures During an Emergency Call Failure 5.4.4 Anticipated Behaviour in Crisis Situations 5.5 Discussion and Conclusion 5.6 Appendix: Survey Questions 6 Survey on Citizens’ Perception and Use of Social Media 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Perception of the Use of Social Media in Emergencies 6.2.1 Citizens’ Perception of Social Media 6.2.2 Research Gap 6.3 Methodology 6.3.1 Survey Design 6.3.2 Characteristics of Survey Participants 6.3.3 Quantitative Analysis 6.3.4 Qualitative Analysis 6.4 Empirical Results 6.4.1 Use of Social Media in Emergencies (Q2+Q3): More Searching, Less Sharing 6.4.2 Expectations (Q4): Emergency Services Should Monitor Social Media 6.4.3 Barriers (Q5): False Rumours 6.4.4 Emergency Apps (Q6–8): Used by One Out of Six 6.4.5 Open Comments (Q9): Benefits, Information Flow, Applications Fields, Inexperience, Scepticism 6.5 Discussion and Conclusion 6.5.1 The Perception of Social Media in Emergencies by Citizens’ in Germany 6.5.2 Directions for Future Research 6.5.3 Relationship With Prior Work 6.6 Limitations 6.7 Appendix: Survey Questions 7 Survey on the Adoption, Use and Diffusion of Crisis Apps 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Background and Related Work 7.2.1 Citizens’ Information Demand During Crises 7.2.2 ICT and Apps for Crisis Management 7.2.3 Research Gap 7.3 Representative Study: Methodology 7.3.1 Characteristics of Survey Participants 7.3.2 Data Analysis 7.4 Results 7.4.1 Distributions of Crisis App Usage: Little Awareness and Interest 7.4.2 Attitudes Towards Crisis Apps: Low Effort, High Functionality 7.4.3 Reasons for (Non-)Usage of Crisis Apps: Ignorance Is the Primary Issue 7.5 Discussion and Conclusion 7.5.1 Main Results 7.5.2 Implications of Our Findings 7.5.3 Limitations and Outlook Part III Design and Evaluation Findings 8 Design and Evaluation of Social Media Guidelines for Citizens 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Related Work: Challenges of Social Media in Emergencies and Existing Guidelines 8.2.1 Use and Challenges of Social Media in Emergencies 8.2.2 Existing Guidelines for the Use of Social Media 8.2.3 Research Gap and Objective 8.3 Methodology 8.3.1 Designs of Citizens’ Guidelines 8.3.2 Evaluation of the Citizens’ Guidelines 8.4 Results 8.4.1 Importance of Individual Recommendations of the Guidelines 8.4.2 Influencing Factors on the Attitude towards the Guidelines 8.4.3 Citizens’ Attitudes and Suggestions concerning the Guidelines 8.5 Discussion and Conclusion 8.6 Appendix: Visualization of the Guidelines 8.7 Appendix: Correlations between Responses for all Guidelines 9 Design and Evaluation of a Cross Social Media Alerting System 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Conceptual Framing and Related Work 9.2.1 Crisis Communication Perspective: The Authorities’ Challenges of Information Overload, Quality and Communication in Emergencies 9.2.2 Social Media Analytics Perspective: Suitability of Existing Systems for the Authorities’ Use in Emergencies 9.2.3 Social Media Analytics Systems for Event Detection and Alert Generation 9.2.4 Research Gap 9.3 Requirements Analysis: Methodology, Pre-Studies and Workshops 9.4 Development and Architecture of a Cross-Platform Social Media Based Alerting System 9.4.1 The Backend: Grouping Messages to Alerts 9.4.2 The Front-end: Visualisation of Alerts 9.5 Methodology of the Systems’ Evaluation 9.5.1 Live & Paper-based Demonstrations (2017) 9.5.2 Workshop Exercise (2017) 9.5.3 Field Trials (2017) 9.6 Results of the Systems’ Evaluation 9.6.1 General Attitudes and Impressions (Q1) 9.6.2 Social Media Alerts (Q3) 9.6.3 Information Quality (Q4) 9.6.4 Importance and Usefulness of Functionality (Q2+Q5) 9.6.5 Additional Functionality (Q6) 9.7 Discussion 9.7.1 Information Quality and White-Box Algorithm Representation: Supporting the Subjectivity, Tailorability and Transparency of Filtering 9.7.2 Information Overload and Usable Configurability: Improving the Algorithmic Performance and Configurability of Social Media Alerts by Users 9.8 Conclusion 10 Design and Evaluation of an Active Relevance Classification System 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Literature Review 10.2.1 Method 10.2.2 Social Media in Disasters and Relevance Classification as Means to Mitigate Information Overload 10.2.3 Abstract and Precise Criteria for Relevance Classification 10.2.4 Machine Learning and Social Media Analytics for Relevance Classification 10.2.5 Research Gap 10.3 Technological Basis: Social Data Management and Analysis 10.3.1 Method 10.3.2 Overall Architecture 10.3.3 Backend: The Social Media Service 10.3.4 Frontend: The Social Media Observatory 10.4 Evaluation I: Relevance Classification via Batch Learning 10.4.1 Approach 10.4.2 Evaluation 10.5 Evaluation II: Relevance Classification via Active and Online Learning 10.5.1 Approach 10.5.2 Preliminary Evaluation 10.6 Discussion and Conclusion 10.6.1 Results 10.6.2 Practical Implications 10.6.3 Theoretical Contributions 10.6.4 Limitations and Future work 11 Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Related Work and Comparison of Crisis Apps 11.2.1 Authorities’ Demand for Citizen-Generated Content (C2A) 11.2.2 Citizens’ Demand for Crisis Communication (A2C) 11.2.3 Crisis Apps and Contextual Factors for Bidirectional Communication 11.2.4 Research Gap 11.3 Development and Architecture of the Emergency Mobile App 11.3.1 Overall Methodology 11.3.2 Functionalities of the Emergency App 11.4 Evaluation of the Emergency Mobile App 11.4.1 Methodology 11.4.2 Results 11.5 Discussion and Conclusion Part IV Conclusion and Outlook 12 Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Response 12.1 Overview of the Information Refinement Framework 12.2 Event Perspective 12.2.1 Characteristics and Types of Crises 12.2.2 Information Use and Expectation in Different Phases of a Crisis 12.3 Organisational Perspective 12.3.1 Goals, Objective, Strategies and Tactics of Emergency Services 12.3.2 Persons, Roles and Cooperation With External Stakeholders 12.3.3 Perception and Challenges of Technology Adoption 12.4 Societal Perspective 12.4.1 Citizens’ Behaviour and Roles in the Digital Realm 12.4.2 Attitudes and Reported Use of Mobile Technologies and Social Media in Emergencies 12.4.3 Expectations Towards Authorities, Emergency Services, and Other Organisations 12.5 Technological Perspective 12.5.1 Channels: What Are relevant Channels to Fulfil Objectives? 12.5.2 Access: Which Data Is Available and How It Is Accessible? 12.5.3 Content: What Are Characteristics of Emergency Information? 12.5.4 Analysis: How Can Technology Assist in the Analysis of Information? 12.5.5 Filtering: How to Detect and Filter for the Relevant Information? 12.5.6 Evaluation: How Can the Results Inform My Decision and Action? 13 Conclusion and Future Work 13.1 Main Findings 13.2 Empirical and Theoretical Contributions 13.3 Design and Practical Contributions 13.4 Limitations and Future Work References