Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information

By Kate Starbird, Leysia Palen, Amanda Lee Hughes, Sarah Vieweg. Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2010

535 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media reporting, among other types. We examine the social life of microblogged information, identifying generative, synthetic, derivative and innovative properties that sustain the broader system of interaction. The landscape of Twitter is such that the production of new information is supported through derivative activities of directing, relaying, synthesizing, and redistributing, and is additionally complemented by socio-technical innovation. These activities comprise self-organization of information.

Subfields: Communication

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9c23d05db7274582ca5c0fc6ca98ec5f98d2de9

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Citations in the corpus

Predicting information credibility in time-sensitive social media (2013, unknown): “A preliminary evaluation conducted over the full collection of cases indicates to us that the use of a J48 decision tree achieves very competitive results with other classifiers such as naive Bayes or support vector machines.”
"Voluntweeters": self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis (2011, background): “This work extends previous research on the use of social media during crisis, e.g. [5,7,17,19,21].”
Detecting Automation of Twitter Accounts: Are You a Human, Bot, or Cyborg? (2012, background): “In addition to network-related studies, several previous works focus on sociotechnological aspects of Twitter [7], [8], [19], [20], [21], such as its use in the workplace or during major disaster events.”
Twitinfo: aggregating and visualizing microblogs for event exploration (2011, background): “tracked tweets from different geographical areas on a timeline as the Red River flood proceeded [27].”
Microblogging after a major disaster in China: a case study of the 2010 Yushu earthquake (2011, methodology): “Starbird et al. investigated the “social life” of microblogged information, and identified four types of information evolution: generative, derivative, synthetic, and innovative activities [21].”
Towards Supporting Search over Trending Events with Social Media (2013, background): “Research on crisis informatics has demonstrated that social media users can generate and synthesize valuable information in a real-time, distributed manner (Starbird et al. 2010).”
A geographic approach for combining social media and authoritative data towards identifying useful information for disaster management (2015, methodology): “…role of users local to the event (or ‘ on the ground ’ ), who are more probable to generate useful information for improving situational awareness (Starbird et al. 2010, Vieweg et al. 2010, Acar and Muraki 2011, Bruns et al. 2012, Dugdale et al. 2012, Starbird and Muzny 2012, Imran et al. 2013).”
Natural Language Processing to the Rescue? Extracting "Situational Awareness" Tweets During Mass Emergency (2011, background): “A recent surge in research on computer-mediated communication during mass emergency situations looks at content in blogs, social media sites and microblogging services (Mendoza et al., 2010; Palen et al., 2009; Qu et al., 2009; Starbird et al., 2010; Vieweg et al., 2010).”
Applications of Topics Models to Analysis of Disaster-Related Twitter Data (2009, background): “More specifically, interest in microblogging in emergency management activities is on the rise (e.g. [8], [9], and [7]).”
Pass it on?: Retweeting in mass emergency (2010, background): “Previous research indicates that there are a variety of different account types, including individuals, local and national mainstream media, alternative media, service providers, representatives of established businesses, small business promoters, among others (Starbird et al., 2010).”
Pandemics in the Age of Twitter: Content Analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 Outbreak (2010, background): “More minute changes were also observed and were found to be highly influenced by the media and external events. Examples of this included the large spike in tweets that resulted from the WHO pandemic level 6 announcement and the two peaks in personal experiences that coincided with the first and sec”
Microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness (2010, methodology): “In a focused study of the Red River event reported elsewhere [34], we describe macro-level microblogging activity which focuses on the original sources of information, i.e. information that was broadcast and is original to the Twitterer, secondarily synthesized from several sources, or re-sourced…”
Tweets from Justin Bieber's heart: the dynamics of the location field in user profiles (2011, background): “Academic HCI research has seen an increase in the number of papers on geographic information (e.g. [8, 18, 20, 21, 24, 26]).”
Hip and trendy: Characterizing emerging trends on Twitter (2011, background): “…society (Johnson, 2009), as evidenced during major global events such as the Iran election or the reaction to the earthquake in Haiti (Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010), as well as in response to local events and emergencies (Shklovski, Palen, & Sutton, 2008; Starbird, Palen, Hughes, & Vieweg, 2010).”
Information credibility on twitter (2011, unknown): “Twitter has been used widely during emergency situations, such as wildfires [6], hurricanes [12], floods [32, 33, 31] and earthquakes [15, 7].”
Codified Hashtags for Weather Warning on Twitter: an Italian Case Study (2016, unknown): “In particular content analysis was meant to assess the potential increase of ontopic tweets and of messages increasing situational awareness, compared to similar researches carried out in different contexts (Starbird et al. 2010 ; Starbird and Palen 2010 ; Vieweg al.”
Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency (2014, background): “2 Since then, it has become common practice for affected populations and concerned others to use Twitter to communicate, ask questions, collect and spread information, and organize response efforts (among other tasks) [Starbird et al. 2010; Vieweg et al. 2010; Sarcevic et al. 2012; Starbird 2013; Im”