Blogs

Brisbane.
I’m still blogging somewhat selectively from the Australia New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management conference, given that some of the presentations here really are well outside my own research area. I’m here, though, because I’m presenting a paper with my QUT colleague Jean Burgess on our research into the use of Twitter following the 2010/11 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. The presentation is below (with audio to come soon, hopefully), and the full paper is also online.

This research is also associated with a new ARC Linkage-funded three-year research project on “Social Media in Times of Crisis” which we’re undertaking along with the Queensland Department for Community Safety and the Eidos Institute. There’s a PhD scholarship attached to this project, and we’re now looking for expressions of interest for this position, to commence shortly: students will be embedded with the DCS in Brisbane to develop, deploy, and evaluate enhanced strategies for the Department’s use of social media; they will also need to develop connections to other relevant emergency and media institutions. Students with strong connections to the local Brisbane and south-east Queensland community would be ideal. If you’re interested, please get in touch: a.bruns [at] qut.edu.au.

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZDMC 2012 is Chris Fisher from the Queensland Department of Community Safety, who presents DCS’s ‘All Hazards’ approach to integrated information management. This is especially important in the context of disasters, in order to accelerate the provision of essential information to stakeholders and the public. But this is limited by existing barriers and silos – and it cannot simply be addressed through better information technology.

Disasters do not respect borders or organisational boundaries – and to address this, ‘All Hazards’ became an informational problem-solving exercise. It was an important recognition of ‘information’ as an independent entity in the disaster management process. The programme delivers planning and intelligence, decision support, resource management and coordination, public engagement, and shared situational awareness, and builds on a foundation of information exchange and interoperability.

Brisbane.
OK, after a brief power outage (why are there never enough outlets in conference facilities?), I’m back to blog the afternoon sessions at ANZDMC 2012. We begin with a presentation by Paul Salmon, who will apply systems theory to the disaster response context.

Disaster preparation, response and recovery processes are complex sociotechnical systems. They have shorter and longer timeframes, and small events can have huge implications well down the track. This means that systems theory models can be applied to the study of these processes: complex systems comprise various levels (relating to the various stakeholders in the process), and systems depend on the quality of their vertical integration between these levels, providing a bidirectional feedback system.

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZDMC is Paul Pisasale, the Mayor of Ipswich (which was also severely affected in the 2011 south-east Queensland floods, of course). Paul is currently in re-election mode, so he starts with a bit of a sales pitch for Ipswich.

He notes the problems of talking to the media during the crisis: while the disaster management team might have known what a prospective flood level of 18m meant, the media largely didn’t, and this had the potential of causing substantial stress for the community – so there needed to be clear communication strategies for getting the right message across. Also, decision-making needed to be team-based, rather than being driven by titles and positions.

Brisbane.
Over the next couple of days, I’m at the Australia New Zealand Disaster & Emergency Management Conference (ANZDMC), where Jean and I will present our research into the uses of Twitter in the Christchurch earthquake later today. We begin with a keynote from Assistant Commissioner Peter Martin from the Queensland Police Service, though, who was District Disaster Coordinator for the Brisbane-based response to the 2011 floods.

From late November 2010, Queensland experienced some very heavy rain, and many rivers across the state reached record flood levels, this was worsened by Cyclone Tasha in north Queensland by the end of December. On 10 January, Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley experienced devastating flash flooding, and early in February Cyclone Yasi hit towns in far north Queensland. This also had substantial effects on statewide infrastructure. 98% of the state were affected.

OK, so to save this blog from turning completely into a conference blog (watch out for the Australia/New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, starting next week), here’s a round-up of my most recent publications. Most of these build on our Twitter research – and you can find more detailed updates about those projects over at Mapping Online Publics.

I’ve had three co-authored journal articles published over the past few weeks. Of these, the most recent one is in First Monday, and was co-authored with Eugene Liang Yuxiang from the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, following on from a workshop on Twitter and crisis communication research which took place there last October. In the paper, Eugene and I compare our approaches to tracking disaster-related communication on Twitter – I discuss our work with yourTwapperkeeper and Eugene outlines the infrastructure the Taiwanese team have built. For more, see:

Axel Bruns and Eugene Liang Yuxian. “Tools and Methods for Capturing Twitter Data during Natural Disasters.” First Monday 17.4 (2012).

Two other publications are co-authored with my QUT colleague Jean Burgess, and appeared in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice within two days of each other. The first of these is another methodology article, and outlines how our methods for Twitter research may be used by journalists and journalism researchers; it’s based on the paper we presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2011. More details are here:

Canberra.
And the (dubious) honour of presenting the final paper in the final session at DHA 2012 falls to … me. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add audio to this as soon as I can, too I've now finally also managed to add the audio, no thanks to a very dysfunctional Slideshare.

Canberra.
We’ve reached the last session of Digital Humanities Australasia 2012, and it’s the one I’m in as well. But we start with Mark Coté, whose interest is especially in smart phones. He begins by asking whether long-term humanists may sometimes feel as overrun by the digital humanities as inner-city dwellers may now feel by smart phone-wielding users.

Nonetheless, the digital humanities are an exciting development, and there’s now a need for some conceptual inquiries into the digital humanities. One area for this is the relationship between the human and technology, which must question the nature of the human, and its ontological status as ‘natural’. There has always been a constitutive relationship between the human and technology, Mark suggests, and this understanding runs counter to a more traditional line in western metaphysics which distinguishes craft, knowledge, and nature.

Canberra.
The final speakers in this DHA 2012 session are Monica Omodei and Gordon Mohr. Monica, from the National Library of Australia, begins by pointing out the importance of Internet content as raw data for humanities research – and even when the live Web is the object of study, its ephemeral nature means that archives of Web content are absolutely crucial for verifiability and reproducibility.

Relevant examples of such research include social network research, lexicography, linguistics, network science, and political science, amongst many others. Common collection strategies to develop archives of online content include thematical and topical archiving, resource-specific archiving (e.g. audiovisual materials), broad surveys (e.g. domain-wide), exhaustive (closure crawls for a specific Web space), or frequency-based. Such captures will have input from domain experts, will operate iteratively, use registry data or trusted directories to determine what to capture, etc.

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA 2012 is Anna Gerber, whose interest is in open annotation for electronic editions. She defines annotations as additional information attached to a digital resource or part of the resource, which do not modify the original content of the resource itself.

Such annotations traditionally exist as footnotes, endnotes, glossary entries, or in other forms, providing descriptions, explanations, or justifications for particular textual or formatting choices (especially in critical editions); they may also be used to link in secondary material. But such annotations – especially in digital editions – can also be used for comments, questions, and replies; that is, to sustain a dialogue around the primary text.