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Crisis Communication

Homebrew CommResearch Club: Computational Approaches to Studying COVID-19 (CCA 2020)

CCA Solidarity Symposium 2020

Homebrew CommResearch Club: Computational Approaches to Studying COVID-19

Jonathan Zhu, Axel Bruns, Wenhong Chen, Cuihua Cindy Shen, Celine Yunya Song, and Wayne Xu

Homebrew Comm-Research is gaining momentum while we work from home. What are the basic approaches of computational communication research that may help combat the pandemic?

'Like a Virus' - Disinformation in the Age of COVID-19 (A@H 2020)

Australia at Home 2020

‘Like a Virus’ – Disinformation in the Age of COVID-19

Tim Graham and Axel Bruns

The COVID-19 pandemic has also spawned an “infodemic” – where life-saving facts and genuine expertise are often overrun by half-truths, lies, and scams going viral online.

An Anatomy of a Taiwanese Misinformation Storm

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

Using Twitter to Monitor the Smoke Impact of Wildfires

The final paper in this final session of Social Media & Society 2018 is Sonya Sachdeva, whose interest is in the role of social media in discussing the smoke from wildfires. Wildfires themselves have become more prevalent and more intense around the world, as a result of climate change, and the smoke from such fires can affect far larger areas than the fires themselves. Some two thirds of the United States are affected by the smoke from wildfires, even if they are nowhere near forests and firezones.

Discussions of the Swine Flu and Ebola Epidemics on Twitter

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Wasim Ahmed, whose focus is on discussions of infectious diseases on Twitter. Such diseases can be very deadly, and when outbreaks occur they lead to the public expression of people’s views and opinions via social media. There’s a need to further understand such communication processes, beyond mere metrics, through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

Monitoring Air Pollution through Twitter Data

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Supraja Gurajala, whose interest is in using Twitter data for responding to air quality issues. Air quality is a major health issue in population and industrial centres around the world, and metrics like the Air Quality Index (AQI) and Particulate Matter index (PM) are key to its assessment.

2016 Publications Round-Up

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.

Accountability in Digital Humanitarianism

The final paper in this AoIR 2016 session is Mirca Madianou, who begins with a clip promoting the "I Sea" app that purports to take a crowdsourcing approach to scanning satellite images for migrant boats in the Mediterranean in order to spot and help boats in distress. However, that app was a scam; it showed static satellite images rather than live feeds.

Launch of Policy Report on Social Media and Emergency Management Organisations

Over the past three years, my colleagues and I at Queensland University of Technology have partnered with Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) and the Eidos Institute to undertake an Australian Research Council Linkage project to analyse and evaluate how social media are used by emergency management authorities, media organisations and citizens during recent natural disasters events.

Report launchDuring this time we have worked closely with officers from several Australian emergency management organisations to better understand from their practical experience how social media are used in emergency communications, and to find out those areas that are working well as well as those where improvements can be made. As a result of our research and industry discussions, it became apparent that there is a need for a national policy framework that addresses the use of social media in crisis communication, particularly to support the development of effective social media communication strategies and the positioning, resourcing, and training of social media units and/or staff in emergency management agencies and local governments. The Social Media Policy Report Support Frameworks for the Use of Social Media by Emergency Management Organisations has been developed to address this need, and it was launched at Old Government House, Brisbane, by Teresa Gambaro MP on Friday 13 November 2015.

Crowdsourced Images in the Boston Marathon Attack

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Anssi Männistö, who shifts our focus to the Boston Marathon bomb attack. Mobile social media played an important role in covering this attact: tweets and mobile media were no longer just sources of information, but also tools to very facts and photos and to identify potential suspects, through image recognition software and other facilities.

In Boston, journalists rapidly discovered the first reports and images of the attack from Twitter, and soon came to use them in their own coverage. Such material was then used in official investigations, unofficial hunts for the culprits, and in the media coverage. These each drew on a massive amount of mobile photos; on the real-time publishing of such content in social media; and on crowdsourcing of activities through social media.

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