Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are longterm, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine how blogs written during a protracted conflict might reflect a collective view of the event. The sheer amount of data originating from the Internet about a significant event poses a challenge to researchers; we employ topic modeling and pronoun analysis as methods to analyze such large-scale data. First, we discovered that blog war topics temporally tracked the actual, measurable violence in the society suggesting that blog content can be an indicator of the health or state of the affected population. We also found that people exhibited a collective identity when they blogged about war, as evidenced by a higher use of first person plural pronouns compared to blogging on other topics. Blogging about daily life decreased as violence in the society increased; when violence waned, there was a resurgence of daily life topics, potentially illustrating how a society returns to normalcy.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of Facebook use amongst a population living through ongoing disruption. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens, as well as received survey responses from 218 individuals, who have been experiencing the current Gulf War since March 2003. We show how people in a society experiencing conflict use Facebook in ways that are different to uses in non-war societies. We find that Facebook supports people living in crisis environments at two levels. First, Facebook aids people directly to recover from disruption. People used Facebook to create “safe lists”, to seek help and provide assistance, and to re-construct their social scaffolding. But at a deeper level, citizens also used Facebook to maintain and develop new social norms, and to re-direct their country. We discuss how disruption can serve as an opportunity by which people can re-invent their societies and how our understandings of Facebook should evolve.

In this paper we investigate the role blogs played within the context of the Egyptian revolution of early 2011 using blog data authored between 2004-2011. We conducted topic modeling analysis to gain a longitudinal view of the interaction of societal, personal and revolutionary blog topics over this period. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of blog posts during the period that bracketed the political uprising revealed Egyptian bloggers’ concerns. Reporting events and supplying commentary provided bloggers with a means to voice dissent against institutionalized power represented by the government-controlled media. In short, blogs reveal a counter-narrative to the government-supplied version of events in Egypt during the 18-day uprising. These narratives offer rich documentation of how blogs, and perhaps social media more generally, can be utilized by individuals operating under repressive conditions.

This paper examines microblogging information diffusion activity during the 2011 Egyptian political uprisings. Specifically, we examine the use of the retweet mechanism on Twitter, using empirical evidence of information propagation to reveal aspects of work that the crowd conducts. Analysis of the widespread contagion of a popular meme reveals interaction between those who were “on the ground” in Cairo and those who were not. However, differences between information that appeals to the larger crowd and those who were doing on-the-ground work reveal important interplay between the two realms. Through both qualitative and statistical description, we show how the crowd expresses solidarity and does the work of information processing through recommendation and filtering. We discuss how these aspects of work mutually sustain crowd interaction in a politically sensitive context. In addition, we show how features of this retweet recommendation behavior could be used in combination with other indicators to identify information that is new and likely coming from the ground.

Social media tools, including the microblogging platform Twitter, have been appropriated during mass disruption events by those affected as well as the digitally-convergent crowd. Though tweets sent by those local to an event could be a resource both for responders and those affected, most Twitter activity during mass disruption events is generated by the remote crowd. Tweets from the remote crowd can be seen as noise that must be filtered, but another perspective considers crowd activity as a filtering and recommendation mechanism. This paper tests the hypothesis that crowd behavior can serve as a collaborative filter for identifying people tweeting from the ground during a mass disruption event. We test two models for classifying on-the-ground Twitterers, finding that machine learning techniques using a Support Vector Machine with asymmetric soft margins can be effective in identifying those likely to be on the ground during a mass disruption event.

We report on the use of a team of trusted digital volunteers during the 2011 Shadow Lake Fire that occurred in the US Pacific Northwest to extend the social media capacity of a Type I incident management team. In this case study, we outline the tools and processes used by this virtual team to coordinate their activities, monitor social media communication and to establish communications with the public around the event. Finally, we discuss the potential merits and limitations of implementing a team of trusted volunteers and explore how this idea could be incorporated into emergency management organizations.

When societies experience disruption as caused by natural disasters, various official government agencies, relief organizations, and emergent citizen groups engage in activities that aid in the recovery effort—the process that leads to the resumption of normal life. In war environments however, societal trust can be affected and people may develop distrust of the institutions and associated individuals that provide and resolve breakdowns in infrastructure. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the use of ICTs by citizens experiencing ongoing disruption in a conflict zone. We conducted 86 interviews with Iraqi civilians who experienced the 2nd Gulf War beginning in March 2003. We show how citizens used ICTs to continuously resolve breakdowns in infrastructure during ongoing disruption caused by the conflict by creating new, reliable technology-mediated social arrangements that enabled people to maintain daily routines for travel, education and obtaining information. We then discuss new ways to think about infrastructure and implications for the disaster relief effort.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-enabled behavior that took place amongst a citizen population living in a conflict zone. We interviewed 65 Iraqi citizens who experienced the current Gulf War beginning in March 2003. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust in people and institutions can erode. We find that trust is contextual–-as aspects of the physical world change, conceptions of trust can also change. We show how people were able to create a context of trust in the environment by using ICTs to manage their public identity, to conduct background checks, and to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain work collaborations, to determine whether or not to continue interacting with others in public, to be able to travel safely, and to find trustworthy jobs. In developing these new practices we argue that technology enabled people to restore a sense of normalcy in an environment that had radically changed.

The blogosphere is changing how people experience war and conflict. We conducted an analysis of 125 blogs written by Iraqi citizens experiencing extreme disruption in their country. We used Hoffman’s [8] stages of recovery model to understand how blogs support people in a region where conflict is occurring. We found that blogs create a safe virtual environment where people could interact, free of the violence in the physical environment and of the strict social norms of their changing society in wartime. Second, blogs enable a large network of global support through their interactive and personal nature. Third, blogs enable people experiencing a conflict to engage in dialogue with people outside their borders to discuss their situation. We discuss how blogs enable people to collaboratively interpret conflict through communities of interest and discussion with those who comment. We discuss how technology can better support blog use in a global environment.

Social media enables the creation of online communities across physical boundaries. Blogs, or weblogs, enable bloggers to interact with a range of followers. We sought to conduct a qualitative study of the nature of the interactions that emerge in a blog community whose members are experiencing the impacts of ongoing conflict. We chose the Iraqi blogging community as a case study and focused on investigating the role of intercultural interactions in shaping people’s experiences during conflict. We found that intercultural interactions aided people by providing support, finding commonality, building a knowledge base, and in giving advice on restoring infrastructure. The intercultural interactions provided alternative views of an event constructed from diverse cultural perspectives. We found that the intercultural interactions we observed suggest a degree of intercultural competency within the blogosphere.

This paper considers a subset of the technology-enabled communication that took place among citizen populations experiencing various disruptions, e.g. disaster and war. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust can erode where people no longer rely on institutions for support (i.e. the government), or where citizens do not trust other people. We argue that depending on what is taking place in the physical world, trust in people, information, and institutions can change – in this sense, trust is contextual. We then offer recommendations for designing new technologies for people who experience disruption, taking into account trust and context.

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.

Citizen journalism has changed the nature of how news is disseminated about local and global events. We conducted an ethnographic study of a particular kind of citizen journalism: the use of war diaries on the Internet. These diaries were targeted to an audience outside of the informants’ countries and cultures. We found that people wrote war diaries to reach out to people who were in environments not in a war as a way of sensemaking, for impression management, and to be participants in the social production of news and opinions about the war. We discuss how the use of a “war diary” as a public narrative empowered our informants and how they contributed to the social interpretation of their culture during war. Through the Internet war diary, people can communicate news beyond the physical boundaries of their country providing benefits to producers of the information as well as the consumers.

Little attention has been given to how citizens use technology to be resilient when their country is at war. We report on an ethnographic interview study of how technology was adopted and used by citizens to be resilient during wartime. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens experiencing the current Iraq war. Based on our data we identified properties of resilience: reconfiguring social networks, self-organization, redundancy, proactive practices, and repairing trust in information. Technology supported people in being resilient by enabling them to control identity, to collaborate across religious sects, to create an organizational memory, and to provide alternative sources of news and information. As people adopted and used technology to be resilient we found a merging of old and new cultural practices. We discuss these systemic changes and describe implications for how technology can support people in being resilient when their environment is disrupted.

People depend on human infrastructure for a range of activities in their daily lives, such as work and socializing. In this paper we consider three different intertwined types of infrastructures of a society that may be affected in crisis situations: the physical, technological, and human infrastructures. We argue that when the human infrastructure is damaged, e.g. in a natural catastrophe or war, then people can switch reliance to the technological infrastructure to be resilient. We conducted an empirical study of 85 people who lived in war zones during the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war and the ongoing Gulf war in Iraq. In this paper, we report how information technology is used by our informants in new ways in their attempt to maintain social relationships and continue working. Our informants also used technology to help navigate safe routes for travel and for psychological support. We discuss implications of our results for disaster research.

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.

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 site as a virtual destination in the aftermath of the Northern Illinois University (NIU) shootings of February 14, 2008 in relation to related activity that happened in response to the Virginia Tech (VT) tragedy 10 months earlier. We consider features of interactions that are enabled when a vast audience converges under such conditions. We discuss how commiseration and information seeking are interrelated, and how geographical communities that share a common experience ally in such a public, online setting.

In CSCW, there has been little or no attention given to how people use technology to restore collaborations when there is a major environmental disruption. We are especially interested in studying resilience in collaboration–the extent to which people continue to collaborate with work groups or to socialize despite prolonged disruption. We conducted an empirical study of people living in two countries that experienced prolonged disruption through war in their work and personal lives. We describe how technology played a major role in providing people with alternative resources to reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns of action, for work and socializing. People created new assemblages of technological and physical resources. We discuss how the use of new resources in creating new routines led to more of a reliance on virtual work and in some cases to deeper structural changes.

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 instances of this distributed problem-solving activity, and explain, using an ethnomethodological lens, how a loosely connected group of people can work together on a grave topic to provide accurate results.