In this paper, we examine the emerging use of ICT in social phenomena such as natural disasters. Researchers have acknowledged that a community possesses the capacity to manage the challenges in crisis response on its own. However, extant IS studies focus predominantly on IS use from the crisis response agency’s perspective, which undermines communities’ role. By adopting an empowerment perspec...

South Africa's mainstream print and broadcast media have attained a central role in shaping the discourse about HIV/AIDS as a result of their elevated role in politics after apartheid. Studies of media coverage of HIV/AIDS, however, have shown that despite the horrific impact of AIDS in South Africa, until recently national media coverage (both the extent as well as the content) -with few excep...

To be able to take efficient measures in crisis management, it is essential for emergency services to get as much details about an actual situation on-site as possible. Currently content from social media plays an important role since those platforms are used to spread crisis-relevant data within the population. Our contribution presents a concept which supports the situation assessment practic...

Recent research has shown that social media platforms like twitter can provide relevant information to improve situation awareness during emergencies. Previous work is mostly concentrated on the classification and analysis of tweets utilizing crowdsourcing or machine learning techniques. However, managing the high volume and velocity of social media messages still remains challenging. In order ...

Geospatially-oriented social media communications have emerged as a common information resource to support crisis management. Our research compares the capabilities of two popular systems used to collect and visualize such information Project Epic’s Tweak the Tweet (TtT) and Ushahidi. Our research uses geospatially-oriented social media gathered by both projects during recent disasters to compa...

Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. This work addresses several important tasks of visualizing and predicting short term text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word’s contextual semantics. We study the relationship between short-term concept drift and representation shift on a...

Walter Benjamin is best known for his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, (Benjamin, 1968b) in which he argues that film and other mechanical technologies are destroying the aura that had belonged to traditional art. In this article we apply Benjamin’s concept of aura to new (digital) media, and in particular to ‘mixed reality’, a group of technologies that blend comp...

Social media is becoming increasingly important during crisis situations. Affected people are now enabled to provide helpful on-site information, and emergency service organisations can use social media to inform people and communicate with them. This study addresses how different communication roles in social media affect sensemaking during crises situations. To this end, we conducted a study ...