Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World

Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created real change in the sociology of disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem to be new is not; rather ICT makes some behaviors more visible, in particular first response and altruistic activities. Even so, with each new crisis event, the calls for technological solutions and policy change come fast and furious, often in absence of empirical research. Our lab is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and ICT development in the area of crisis informatics. Here, we report on some of the challenges and findings when conducting empirical study where the subject of attention is disperse, emergent and increasingly expanding through on-line arenas. We specifically consider the challenge of studying citizen- side information generation and dissemination activities during the April 16, 2007 crisis at Virginia Tech, which we have investigated both on-site and on-line.