Advancements in information and communication technology (ICT) offer new possibilities when dealing with crisis situations. In this paper we present the design for a crowd tasking tool (CTT) that is currently under development. We describe how the tool can assist disaster relief coordinators during a crisis by selectively distributing tasks to a crowd of volunteers. We also compare the CTT with...

Currently in developed nations, childhood obesity is generating widespread concern and prompting social and institutional responses. Obesity is constructed as a broad public health crisis, but individuals are constructed as responsible for their own bodies and body sizes within this crisis. We are particularly interested in two aspects that focus on women as central to this phenomenon; the firs...

Crisis responders are increasingly using social media, data and other digital sources of information to build a situational understanding of a crisis situation in order to design an effective response. However with the increased availability of such data, the challenge of identifying relevant information from it also increases. This paper presents a successful automatic approach to handling thi...

This paper presents a case study of a very recent man-made crisis in Norway on 22 July, 2011, during which a single person first detonated a bomb in downtown Oslo and then killed 69 young people on the island of Utøya. It proposes a novel way of conceptualizing the public contribution to mobilization of resources using microblogging, particularly tweeting. By examining aspects of public and pro...

This paper examines punk subcultures as a response to “the condition of postmodernity,” defined here as a crisis of meaning caused by the commodification of everyday life. Punk musicians and subcultures have responded to this crisis in one of two ways. Like other forms of “plank parody” associated with postmodernism, the “culture of deconstruction” expresses nihilism, ironic cynicism, and the p...

In this paper we suggest novel interaction and visualization techniques for a prospective ECML crisis room environment focusing on the analysis of social media data. For this purpose we describe both, concepts providing a Daily Newsflash and concepts for the preparation of Daily Reports referring to a selected incident or crisis situation. The Daily Newsflash is an overview of global incidents ...

With technological development in crisis management reaching a point at which there is wide-scale aggregation of data, including social media, there is a need to focus strongly upon the position of end users in order to uphold data protection principles. Recent wide-ranging European Union legal reforms, finalized in 2016, have enshrined the concept of data protection by design and paved the way...

The readability of text documents has been studied from a linguistic perspective long before people began to regularly communicate via Internet technologies. Typically, such studies look at books or articles containing many paragraphs and pages. However, the readability of short messages comprising a few sentences, common on today’s social networking sites and microblogging services, has receiv...

In this paper the authors studied how Greek politicians use their Internet presence and in particular social media to engage citizens, examining the perceived significance of establishing an online presence and the motivating and hindering factors for doing so. The authors also studied how online strategies are implemented and executed in three different periods, namely pre-elections, a crisis ...

Audience studies is without a doubt one of the most lively subfields within media and communication research. This has been the case for more than a decade. An interesting aspect of the field is that it is relatively communicative. Within the field, researchers from the social sciences and the humanities actually tend to speak to, and learn from, each other, even though research objectives and ...