CU profs study how social networking plugs people in after emergencies

By Laura Snider

Before administrators at Virginia Tech officially identified the 32 victims shot and killed on the campus in April 2007, the names were already known, pieced together from bits of information scattered across the Internet.

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The ISCRAM2008 Mike Meleshkin Award for Best PhD student paper went to the 'crisis informatics' PhD students team (Amanda L. Hughes, Sophia B. Liu and Sarah E. Vieweg) at Colorado University at Boulder. This group contributed no less than three excellent papers.

The Mike Meleshkin award for best ISCRAM Conference PhD student paper has been instituted in honor of our former co-worker, friend and Emergency Response Information Systems scholar Dr. Mikhail ‘Mike’ Meleshkin who passed away on April 18th, 2004. The award includes $500 and a free conference registration for ISCRAM2009.

Receiving the award at ISCRAM2008. In photo from left to right: Sophia Liu, Amanda Hughes, Sarah Vieweg, and Jonas Landgren (award chair).

The award winning papers include the following:

Hughes, Amanda, Leysia Palen, Jeanette Sutton, Sophia Liu, and Sarah Vieweg (2008). “Site-Seeing” in Disaster: An Examination of On-Line Social Convergence. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference,
Washington, DC.

Liu, Sophia, Leysia Palen, Jeanette Sutton, Amanda Hughes, and Sarah Vieweg (2008). In Search of the Bigger Picture: The Emergent Role of On-Line Photo Sharing in Times of Disaster. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference, Washington, DC.

Vieweg, Sarah, Leysia Palen, Sophia Liu, Amanda Hughes, and Jeannette Sutton (2008). Collective Intelligence in Disaster: Examination of the Phenomenon in the Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference, Washington, DC.

The Crisis Informatics team will be attending ISCRAM 2008 (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management), in Washington, DC. At the conference we will be presenting the following four papers:

Hughes, Amanda, Leysia Palen, Jeanette Sutton, Sophia Liu, and Sarah Vieweg (2008). “Site-Seeing” in Disaster: An Examination of On-Line Social Convergence. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference,
Washington, DC.

Liu, Sophia, Leysia Palen, Jeanette Sutton, Amanda Hughes, and Sarah Vieweg (2008). In Search of the Bigger Picture: The Emergent Role of On-Line Photo Sharing in Times of Disaster. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference, Washington, DC.

Sutton, Jeannette, Leysia Palen and Irina Shlovski (2008). Back-Channels on the Front Lines: Emerging Use of Social Media in the 2007 Southern California Wildfires. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference, Washington.

Vieweg, Sarah, Leysia Palen, Sophia Liu, Amanda Hughes, and Jeannette Sutton (2008). Collective Intelligence in Disaster: Examination of the Phenomenon in the Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting. Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference, Washington, DC.

Professor Leysia Palen and her work is featured in an article appearing in New Scientist this week: "Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you"! The article can be accessed online here:

New Scientist Magazine Article

By Bill Brand

BERKELEY _ When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.

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By Peter S. Goodman

Facebook, the vast and expanding social networking Web site, is about to confront users with a serious new question: What’s your blood type?

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By Josh Catone

It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It's all over the site, including being broken on Twitter-based news organization BreakingNewsOn, which is reporting a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in the UK with minimal damage reported so far. Where didn't we hear about the quake? The mainstream press.

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By Michael Byrne

As the world turned to CNN last April to watch the unfolding of the harrowing events at Virginia Tech, a tidal wave of information seekers turned to new and ubiquitous methods of getting more than traditional media can ever hope. Like tens of thousands of others around the world, Michael Byrne, co-author of this article, and his family logged on to Facebook.com to check on a friend who attended Tech, only to discover she had 400 unanswered messages, an early indication of her murder that day.

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