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"It's Raining Dispersants": Collective Sensemaking of Complex Information in Crisis Contexts

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Addressing crises sometimes requires grappling with sophisticated technical or scientific content. To make sense of the BP DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill people had to grapple with uncertain and sometimes contentious, complex information. This empirical study shows that an emergent, connected crowd interacted to surface, share, question and discuss these complexities. While studies have observed collective sensemaking taking place via social media in other kinds of crises, this study extends our understanding of emergent crowd work as collective sensemaking where members of the public assemble and interpret evidence on complex topics in a crisis context, perhaps performing a kind emergent citizen science.

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Khatchadourian, R. The Gulf War: Were there any heroes in the BP oil disaster. The New Yorker. (March 14, 2011) .
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Paul, S. & Reddy, M. "Understanding together: sensemaking in collaborative information seeking." Proc. of CSCW (2010).
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Rotman, D., Preece, J., Hammock, J. Procita, K., Hansen, D., Parr, C., Lewis, D., & Jacobs, D. Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects. Proc. of CSCW 2012, 217--226.
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Silvertown, J. A new dawn for citizen science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24, 9 (2009), 467--472.
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Starbird, K., Dailey, D., Hayward Walker, A. Leschine, T., Pavia, R. & Bostrom, A. Social Media, Public Participation, and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal. (2014)
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  • (2024)Fighting for Their Voice: Understanding Indian Muslim Women's Responses to Networked HarassmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410058:CSCW1(1-24)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW'15 Companion: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
February 2015
350 pages
ISBN:9781450329460
DOI:10.1145/2685553
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 February 2015

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Author Tags

  1. citizen science
  2. crisis informatics
  3. information diffusion
  4. microblogging
  5. sense-making
  6. social computing
  7. twitter

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  • Poster

Funding Sources

  • NOAA (via University of New Hampshire's Coastal Response Research Center)

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CSCW '15
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CSCW'15 Companion Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Understanding content dissemination on sensemaking: WHO’s social listening strategy on X during the initial phase of COVID-19Online Media and Global Communication10.1515/omgc-2024-0019Online publication date: 30-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Rage Against the Machine: Exploring Violence and Emotion in Conspiracy Narratives on ParlerNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241289905Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Fighting for Their Voice: Understanding Indian Muslim Women's Responses to Networked HarassmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410058:CSCW1(1-24)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Collective Privacy Sensemaking on Social Media about Period and Fertility Tracking post Roe v. WadeProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410008:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)OSINT Research Studios: A Flexible Crowdsourcing Framework to Scale Up Open Source Intelligence InvestigationsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373828:CSCW1(1-38)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Digital Resilience in Dealing with Misinformation on Social Media during COVID-19Information Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-022-10347-526:2(477-499)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Collective Information Seeking During a Health Crisis : Predictors of Google Trends During COVID-19Health Communication10.1080/10410236.2023.2167578(1-15)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2023
  • (2023) Multi‐Modal Crisis Discourse and Collective Sensemaking on TikTok Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.78160:1(203-212)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Sentiment analysis of tweet content on Hurricane Dorian: Sensemaking in digital journalistic inquiry ecologyJournal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies10.1386/ajms_00083_100:00(1-24)Online publication date: 16-May-2022
  • (2022)Compete, Collaborate, Investigate: Exploring the Social Structures of Open Source Intelligence InvestigationsProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517526(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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