2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Disaster Data Assemblages: Five Perspectives on Social Media and
Communities in Response and Recovery
Alex Lambert
Monash University
alex.lambert@monash.edu
Abstract
In this paper I bring together inter-disciplinary
concerns from emergency management, crisis
informatics and media studies to offer five critical
perspectives on social media in disaster response and
recovery. I argue social media become part of ‘disaster
data assemblages’ that have heterogeneous economic,
political, institutional and technological properties.
These assemblages emerge from time-critical situation
awareness procedures and through the help of
volunteer technical communities. They have import for
big data knowledge and data ethics, and continue to
influence disaster recoveries in subtle ways. However,
epistemological problems arise when relating the
response and recovery phases of a disaster data
assemblage. I considering new ways to think about
social and mobile media in recovery that go beyond
both the language of data, and the currently popular
focus on ‘communities of practice’.
1. Introduction
Social media are increasingly used to support
emergency management. These media include blogs,
microblogs, social networks, video and photo sharing
platforms, and the mobile devices that support these
services [1]. Recent books aimed primarily at
practitioners have explored the value of social media
across each phase of the ‘disaster cycle’ – which
traditionally involves prevention, preparedness,
response and recovery – and in the context of widely
used emergency management frameworks [1, 2].
Social media are used in very different ways by
different organisations, and much of their value
remains to be empirically and practically explored.
There are, however, emerging bodies of work which
fall into three camps: how social media can be used for
crisis communication alongside broadcast media [2, 3];
how social media can be used to strengthen community
resilience [4]; and how data can be crowdsourced from
social media to provide intelligence for emergency
response [5-7]. In this paper I explore the last of these
fields, looking particularly at how social media and
1530-1605/16 $31.00 © 2016 Crown Copyright
DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2016.280
emergency managers are converging to produce new
forms of situation awareness in disasters.
Social media-supported situation awareness is
being achieved with the help of social media
monitoring platforms such as Hoot Suite and Signal
used by specially trained Virtual Operation Support
Teams run by emergency management organisations,
as well as Volunteer Technical Communities (VTCs)
such as Ushahidi, Open Street Map, Quake Map, and
Sahana. VTCs apply principles of peer-to-peer
volunteer labour to crowdsourced data to aid
emergency management systems. VTC software
platforms often connect directly to social media APIs
so that disaster-related posts can be searched,
categorised, verified and mapped. They are composed
of volunteer experts from around the world who
expend large amounts of time decoding and translating
web data, associating data with locations, and verifying
data in order to create reliable incident reports which
emergency managers can act on. Although VTCs are
global, they also often rely on deployments in the
disaster zone. For example, the recent Nepal
earthquakes have at least two deployments that are
using Ushahidi and Open Street Map, the Nepal Quake
Map run by Kathmandu Living Labs
(www.kathmandulivinglabs.org), and the Nepal
Monitor run by the Collective Campaign for Peace
(www.cocap.org.np). Such deployments integrate with
the dominant emergency organisation present. In the
case of Nepal this is the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA), which
mediates a cluster system of UN agencies and NGOs.
Currently, most academic literature on the
relationship between social media and disasters is
aimed at an emergency manager audience, and is
particularly concerned with influencing response
practices, platform design and policy [5-8]. I join with
an emerging group of researchers who seek to apply
critical aspects of communication and media studies –
specifically, ‘critical data studies’ – to these issues [9].
Hence, while this paper is aimed primarily at disaster
scholars and practitioners, it also seeks to enrich the
growing interdisciplinary space that is growing around
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this field. I argue for a critical understanding of social
media data as capable of producing diverse social,
cultural, economic and political effects as they flow
through a range of contexts. Hence, a person’s post on
Twitter or Instagram may mean and ‘do’ different
things for an emergency manager, and indeed for
different kinds of emergency managers.
In this article I bring together five
perspectives on this phenomenon, and conceptualise
each in relation to ‘disaster data assemblages’. I begin
by conceptualising ‘disaster data assemblages’,
outlining some of their complex material and
institutional elements. I consider some of the criticism
of ‘big data’ in relation to these assemblages, as well as
ethical issues around data mining that reveal divergent
ethical positions emerging from different institutional
and discursive contexts. Following this, I consider
what happens to disaster data after the ‘acute’ phase of
a disaster has ended. I explore how we need a new
language to understand the role of social media in
disaster recoveries that recognises the quotidian,
psychological and embodied nature of social and
mobile media. In each of these perspectives I try and
open up a space of thinking that will lead to new
research directions, of which I make some suggestions
in the conclusion.
2. Disaster data assemblages
When disasters strike they set off a multitude of time-
critical data gathering and processing efforts which
draw on a range of data sources and infrastructures. To
understand this, I adopt the concept of ‘data
assemblage’ from Kitchen, who writes:
One way to make sense of data is to think of
them as the central concern of a complex
sociotechnical assemblage. This data is
composed of many apparatuses and elements
that are thoroughly entwined, and develop and
mutate over time and space. Each apparatus and
their elements frame what is possible and
expected of data. Moreover, they interact with
and shape each other through a contingent and
complex web of multifaceted relations [10, P.
24]
This description highlights the emergent, contingent
and heterogeneous qualities of data assemblages. To
illustrate this, consider the assemblage that emerged
around the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Infrastructure is
often severely damaged during disasters, hampering
data collection. This is particularly evident when
disasters strike poor areas that lack data infrastructure.
Following the 2010 earthquake, the Haitian
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Government lacked effective administrative
information on health facilities, demographics and
maps. An effort began to quickly rebuild cell networks,
and repurpose and bring together other infrastructures
of different kinds from around the world. Soon an ad
hoc assemblage of different networks, devices,
organisations, platforms and data gathering practices
emerged. This included wired and wireless Internet
infrastructure, cell phones and laptops in the disaster
zone, humanitarian organisations such as those within
OCHA and funding bodies such as the World Bank,
Web 2.0 businesses such as Google and their own data
infrastructures including a global network of data
centres, and the Volunteer Technical Communities
working with OCHA to process data and apply it to
new maps provided by continual aerial and satellite
photography [8]. Interestingly, a similar assemblage
has emerged during the Nepal earthquake, with the
notable addition of drone photography.
This convergence of technological systems is
bound up with a convergence of different global and
local organisations with varying power structures and
degrees of centralisation. For example, peer-to-peer
VTCs converge with vertically governed organisations
such as Google or the World Bank, and with clustered
meta-organisational structures such as OCHA. At
various points these peer-to-peer systems must
confront the hierarchical, command and control
emergency management systems of particular state and
regional governments. These organisations have
different data platforms and protocols with varying
degrees of openness and standardisation. While there
are efforts from numerous parties to create common
collaborative systems [11], the complexity of these
assemblages and the different economic and political
interests they subsume make these efforts difficult.
These qualities also make it hard, though not
impossible, to explain disaster data and their effects
using a single powerful theory. This said, I put forward
four key characteristics of disaster data assemblages.
The practical, ontological and epistemological effects
of these assemblages are captured through the interplay
of these characteristics, and will be expressed in the
sections to follow. Disaster data assemblages:
1. emerge out of and are imperfectly organised
by time-critical situation awareness systems;
2. integrate with Internet data assemblages
chiefly through social media and mapping
platforms;
3. are emergent and complex, creating inherent
ambiguity and partiality;
4. are heterogeneous, creating inherent
governance problems and negative feedbacks
on situation awareness capabilities;
 Disaster data assemblages emerge out of the
need or real-time situation awareness. Satellite orbits
are requisitioned, drone flights are funded, surplus
government staff are redeployed to provide ‘surge
support’, and data are crowdsourced. Yet, given the
complexity and evolving characteristics of these
elements, they can only be organised imperfectly under
any one situation awareness system.
Situation awareness, I argue, describes both a
state of mind and a system of organisational
frameworks that govern information processing and
decision making. These frameworks consist of highly
technical discourses on human-machine integration and
systemic risk that cut across military, logistic, and
emergency organisations, as well as other powerful
modern institutions. Situation awareness is thus the
kind of historically specific power knowledge that
Foucault calls a dispositif [12], and it articulates the
technocratic governance of what Beck refers to as the
‘risk society’ [13].
Emergency managers depend on accurate
situation awareness to make important decisions in
little time and under extreme pressures. For Endsley
[14], situation awareness depends on effective data
gathering, or ‘situation assessment’. Situation
awareness itself involves the perception, understanding
and projection of events, which relies on both human
and machine information processing. Disasters are
‘time critical’ situations, in which data gathering,
processing and decision making must keep apace with
the real time development of the disaster [15]. This
rapid temporality significantly influences the kinds of
data assemblages that disasters produce.
Situation awareness mechanisms use
sophisticated visualisation aids to reduce the gap
between sensory perception and understanding [14].
For disasters, this is facilitated by the mapping of
hazards, damage, infrastructure, services, resources,
population flows and the location of people who need
assistance. The map is the central representational
paradigm in a disaster response effort. Because
disasters constantly change, they produce dynamic and
evolving cartographies. Maps direct response decisions
that produce new realities on the ground, feeding back
on themselves. These dynamisms make ‘the suite of
geographical information methods, models, processing
and visualisation techniques such as GPS, GIS, remote
sensing, and spatial analysis’ [16] particularly useful
for disaster mapping. These systems are combined with
satellite imaging and global networks which compress
space and time in order to produce close to real-time
cartographies of particular locations.
Importantly, much of the innovation in
Geographic Information (GI) science and easy, open
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mapping platforms has come from Web 2.0 companies
such as Google and Apple. Google pioneered GI
science through external partnerships, internal research
and development as well as high profile acquisitions.
Google’s many mapping services – such as Google
Street View, Maps and Earth – produce a kind of
‘virtual globe’ used in a variety of crisis response
applications [17]. These companies also support many
aspects of the ‘social web’, meaning that social media
and mapping are deeply integrated within the same,
mutually influencing ecology. Indeed, for Google and
similar companies the economic value of mapping
services is in their capacity to yield more data on users
which, when combined with data from social and
mobile media, will afford more granular advertising.
As disaster data assemblages integrate with Web 2.0
companies, their capacity for situation awareness
becomes more and more dependent on innovations
which emerge through this convergence of mapping,
social, and mobile media. The great benefit of VTCs
has been to exploit this convergence in order to
crowdsource and crowdmap data of various kinds.
Communities like Ushahidi thus heavily rely on the
open APIs of companies such as Google and Twitter.
Yet this opens up these communities to the vicissitudes
of innovation and policy change associated with these
companies, discussed more in the following section.
3. ‘Bid data’ in disasters
As disaster response efforts converge with Web 2.0
cloud and social media systems, they expose
themselves to new modes of data production and
analysis. Web 2.0 services produce vast amounts of
what is often called ‘big data’. This phrase refers to
both the sheer volume of data being produced online,
as well as the sophisticated algorithms and
infrastructures used to accommodate, search, filter and
analyse this data [18]. Disaster researchers are
designing their own algorithms to statistically classify,
cluster and visualise social media posts [6, 19]. Gao
and colleagues write:
Because the volume and tempo of messages in a
massive disaster will be so high, automated
summaries and analysis to make sense of
hundreds, if not thousands, of unstructured
messages will be another greatly needed
capability [5, p. 13].
Media scholars have been increasingly critical of the
claims made by corporations and researchers that big
data can provide accurate, practical knowledge on
human behaviour through large-scale statistical
correlations. Underlying most of these criticisms is
dissatisfaction with the idea that big data ‘speak for
themselves’ [10, 19]. Crawford and Finn critique this
in relation to disasters, pointing to how disasters
undermine data gathering infrastructure, making data
samples and collection practices incomplete and
selective [9]. Data scientists call these the ‘bias’ and
‘representation’ problems, firmly believing they can
one day be solved. However, as Kitchen [9] argues,
data domains are unbounded and constantly changing,
something which is highly evident when disasters
strike, and this makes a ‘full resolution’ description of
any domain impossible.
There is also a belief in the practicable
objectivity of big data, leaving little need for the
application of theoretical models. Apparently we need
not understand why X does Y, only merely that X does
it. As boyd and Crawford point out, this articulates a
longstanding desire for absolute positivism in
sociology and dissatisfaction with the interpretive
‘pitfalls’ of qualitative research [18]. However, the
absence of an inductive or deductive causality that
takes into account often slippery and complicated
cultural, social and political human issues is patently
problematic.
These are prime examples of how disaster
data assemblages can produce ambiguities and
partialities, yet emergency managers practically
address some of these problems in disaster response.
They are keenly aware that much of the data
crowdsourced through VTCs may be inaccurate and
incomplete [8]. A large amount of human labour is
expended in verifying incident reports and locations
before resources are deployed. This involves cross-
referencing social media posts with other web content,
satellite and aerial imagery, teams on the ground, and
consultants with local knowledge. Control rooms, such
as the State Control centre for Emergency Management
Victoria, have trained human staff dedicated to
monitoring and analysing social media. Emergency
responders depend on subjective and intersubjective
interpretations based on experience and training when
they analyse data. So, while emergency management
systems may be integrated with other systems that are
in the business of producing and filtering big data, the
emergency response process itself places important
checks and balances on this relationship.
Perhaps more concerning for emergency
managers are the ‘data divides’ [18] that determine
access to social media information and hence impact
on situation awareness. The disaster data paradigm in
which VTCs operate is characterised by peer-based
production, and open source principles enacted through
organisation, software and protocol design. Champions
of the open source ethos point to its capacity to fuel
innovation and creativity through network effects and
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collective intelligence [20, 21]. There is also value in
keeping data open when disaster strikes to fuel the
time-critical collaborative work of these communities.
However, many Web 2.0 companies establish data
access restrictions as a matter of corporate policy,
informed by a range of technological, political and
economic factors.
Twitter is a good example in this instance.
Key VTCs such as Ushahidi allow users to tap into
Twitter’s streaming API to create incident reports and
map them. Tweets have also been a popular source of
data used by emergency researchers to develop better
situation awareness systems [6, 22]. Hence, Twitter is a
valuable platform for innovation in emergency
response. At the time of writing, Twitter provides three
APIs through which third parties can access tweet data.
Based on keywords and other search categories, the
‘REST’ and ‘Streaming’ APIs call small selections of
tweets, while the Firehose API can access the entire
real time Twitter feed. Twitter has up until recently
reserved unfettered access to its Firehose API of all
streaming tweets to two data reselling companies,
DataSift and Gnip. However, in May 2014 Twitter
ended its agreement with DataSift and bought Gnip,
effectively monopolising its Firehose. Indeed, this is a
key aspect of the economics of platforms, in which
companies encourage innovation through open APIs
only to internalise successful businesses, outsourcing
risk to the start-up community and producing market
discrimination. Butcher writes, ‘as protocological
objects, the power of the Twitter APIs stems from their
governing capacity to define what counts
as proper innovation’ [23]. There are many cases of
Twitter’s protocological control eviscerating swathes
of innovative Twitter start-up projects, thus
significantly limiting what is ‘done’ with data. In the
case of Twitter’s Firehose, most ‘use cases’ promoted
by Gnip will likely focus on advertising. Small
innovative teams looking to experiment with disaster
modelling may be significantly disadvantaged. This is
an example of the negative feedbacks that can occur in
a heterogeneous data assemblage.
4. Data ethics
Scholars are now starting to take notice of the ethical
issues brought about by disaster responses that
disseminate personal data beyond a user’s awareness
and control, reconstituting these data in new
associative contexts. As Crawford and Finn point out,
practitioners have yet to work out issues of privacy and
consent, and have yet to thoroughly explore how the
data gathered may lead to future forms of ‘social
sorting’: ‘This data can be scraped and held on a range
of databases indefinitely, opening the risk it could be
used in discriminatory contexts in areas such as
employment, property and health insurance’ [9, p.
498]. For those living under persecutory regimes, these
social sorting effects may be more severe. In this vein,
Shanley and colleagues [24] point out that
crowdsourced data may contravene United Nations
humanitarian principles. OCHA’s principles mandate
that data on internally displaced people be given
special protections in accordance with humanitarian
rights [25]. Often this involves the protection of
anonymity, especially in the context of persecutory
governments.
Given that crowdsourced data may relieve the
suffering caused by disasters, Shanley and colleagues
advocate research into striking the proper balance
between open data and privacy regulations. This must
involve carefully scrutinising the data sharing
principles of different institutions including UN
humanitarian agencies, NGOs, federal emergency
management organisations, local government
authorities, community service organisations, VTCs,
and Web 2.0 businesses such as Google. Many official
humanitarian and emergency institutions have
networked or clustered data sharing policies that
attempt to keep data public to emergency managers yet
private from external parties. In reality, there are
problems to do with data siloing and fragmentation,
whereby different organisations find it difficult to share
data [11]. By nature, VTCs need to work with open
data and protocols. However, the assembling of these
data streams into particular archives and maps usually
happens within user defined private accounts called
‘projects’ (see ushahidi.com). This adds to the siloing
effect, creating a multitude of mini-archives with their
own specialised audiences, or what I propose calling
‘technical micro-publics’. The proliferation of these
micro-publics is a consequence of the heterogeneity of
disaster data assemblages.
This can mean different things depending on
the perspective one takes. These micro-publics may
produce a check and balance on data collection through
decentralisation, though one which is admittedly
contingent on platform security. From an emergency
manager’s perspective, this is a serious practical and
hence ethical issue, known as the ‘interface problem’
[11]. Ideally, emergency managers would be able to
centralise all data through a common interfacing
system in order to produce a quicker and more accurate
form of situation awareness to save more lives. These
different perspectives illustrate how disaster data ethics
are complex, bringing together different, sometimes
contradictory institutional practices and discursive
contexts. To advance this field, I argue, we need to go
beyond the study of particular laws or principles that
can govern disaster data assemblages [See 25]. First, a
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study of the different technical micro-publics through
which data flows must be undertaken. A comparison
and categorisation of these micro publics and how they
treat data is essential if we are to understand how they
are to be regulated.
5. Data traces
An issue left relatively unconsidered in disaster
research is how social media data gathered during the
response phase of a disaster continue to have concrete
effects well after that phase has ended. Data archives
leave traces that need to be followed. Emergency
managers will undoubtedly learn from each disaster
and use the experience of data gathering in one disaster
to inform the policies and frameworks used to handle
the next. A potentially more complicated problem is
the way response-phase data influence the way people
and communities recover. This is complicated because
there are a host of practical and conceptual problems
that arise when attempting to relate the information
production and processing that occurs in the response
and recovery phases.
There are practical circumstances that often
prevent disaster data from being successfully leveraged
to aid ongoing recovery efforts. The capacity for a
community to recover well is highly influenced by
local economic, social and political circumstance [26].
There is currently little extant literature on how these
factors relate to the capacity to continue to responsibly
administer data collected during the response phase.
This is a largely open and ongoing empirical issue that
becomes more complex as new social and mobile data
flow through disasters. There are also well researched
institutional issues that affect the usefulness of disaster
data after a disaster has ended. The fragmentation of
data mentioned above, or the lack of cooperation
between different levels of government and
community-led recovery groups [27], would
significantly influence the practicability of
crowdsourced data. These issues are not
insurmountable. I can point to at least one instance in
which VTCs have continued to aid recovery efforts in a
complex environment rife with governance problems.
Open Street Map, a community which mapped much of
Haiti during the earthquake, is building on this
cartographic infrastructure to provide maps of
outbreaks, deaths, and health services to deal with the
country’s ongoing cholera epidemic.
There are also interesting conceptual
problems to do with the different scales and
temporalities of disaster response and recovery. These
produce somewhat different epistemologies that do not
easily translate. Crisis informatics is primarily
concerned with crowdsourcing data from social media
during the acute phase of a disaster to achieve a more
effective form of situation awareness. Here the
discourse is very much about making sense of ‘big
data’. Disaster recovery work, on the other hand, tends
to focus on communities, families and individuals [28],
and on revealing more intimate, place-based practices
[29]. These different scales produce, aggregate and
process different forms of data, and hence produce
different kinds of knowledge.
This often creates conflict between
community knowledge on the one hand and emergency
manager knowledge on the other. For example, a
recent report on recovery management following the
2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in South Eastern
Australia describes the displeasure felt by community-
led recovery committees at the value put in abstract,
top-down, professional and institutional knowledge
instead of local, fine-grained knowledge [28]. State
government authorities were criticised for not
understanding many of the subtleties and complexities
of recovery. This desire for community-led recovery, a
common theme in recent disaster work, reveals some
of the complexity at play when it comes to the sourcing
and processing of social media data. While social
media posts may indeed be sourced from a community,
they are taken out of context, aggregated and processed
through VTC systems and integrated into emergency
manager decision frameworks along with other data,
effectively becoming a part of a top-down, ‘command
and control’ power structure. Can these kinds of data
speak for recovery? Or does recovery need a
completely different way of knowing?
Recoveries also have quite different
temporalities to the acute phase of a disaster. The
temporality of experience – the continuum of slowness,
rapidity, duration and rhythm – significantly influences
how we can come to know and understand the world.
The notion of situation awareness has its own
particular temporality. In the context of emergency
response systems, it is a time-critical framework for
information processing [12]. Here, the quicker the
information is processed the better. Senior operators
tend to make quick decisions, drawing instinctively on
a wealth of experience that becomes available to
‘working memory’ without much reflection [11]. Built
to accommodate a kind of light-speed capitalism,
contemporary data infrastructures bring together
complex physical materialities with sophisticated
algorithmic automation, promising a further reduction
in this decision latency. Recoveries, on the other hand,
are often long, slow and open-ended [30]. This means
we need a different theoretical language to understand
how social and mobile media are used in the response
and recovery phases. In the next section I suggest some
of the ideas we can draw on in this regard.
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6. Social and mobile media in disaster
recovery
Currently, there is little work that rigorously examines
how social and mobile media influence disaster
recovery. When recovery is explicitly mentioned in
relation to social media, it is usually in the context of
‘communities of practice’. That is, online communities
dedicated to particular recovery groups or practices,
and to providing access to information, coordination
and support [4]. Communities of practice increase
‘social capital’, which usually refers to the latent social
resources made available through membership in
heterogeneous networks [31]. Social media supposedly
increases social capital by lowering geographical and
social barriers to making connections [32]. Based on a
range of empirical case studies, Aldrich [33] has
establishes robust links between higher ‘stocks’ of
social capital and better recoveries.
There is indeed evidence that social media can
act as a platform for communities of practice to engage
with government, distribute information, and provide
services to community members. For example, there
are vibrant Facebook pages dedicated to Australian
communities affected by bushfires
(https://www.facebook.com/BlueMountainsBushfireRe
covery) ant to helping government and volunteer
organisations connect with communities
(https://www.facebook.com/sabushfirerecovery).
Communities of practice may also evolve around
mobile media even if they do not have an explicit
online forum in which to communicate. For example,
the smartphone app ‘Jointly’ was created to help
communities recover after Hurricane Sandy, which hit
the eastern coast of the United States in late 2012. The
app allows people to request and offer financial, legal,
construction, medical and transport assistance from
other nearby community members. In bringing
community members together such technologies could
conceivably foster social capital and develop bonds of
trust and shared identity [34].
While these groups and apps are no doubt
important, a singular focus on ‘communities of
practice’ should be avoided, as it can cast a shadow on
other, more engrained media practices that are not
explicitly devoted to aiding recoveries. For example,
many people will already have developed social
networks on social media platforms prior to their
experience of disaster. These networks will not be
organised explicitly around community recoveries, that
is, communities of practice. They are more likely going
to be ‘personal communities’ consisting of
heterogeneous social ties that reflect a particular user’s
unique social biography and habits [34]. Hence, these
networks will consist of many people unaffected by the
disaster yet nevertheless capable of affecting those who
are. While this may provide avenues of social support,
it could also expose vulnerable people to a lack of
privacy and solitude.
Importantly, our quotidian social media
practices are increasingly enacted through mobile
media of various kinds. These media are prostheses of
our social, psychological and biological lives. Their
subtle yet profound connection to social, psychological
and embodied selfhood cannot be overstated [35].
What does it mean to have such technologies influence
the traumas of recovery, to be so close to us when who
we are has changed and continues to change so much?
There is a tendency in disaster research to
jump straight to offering some kind of intervention – a
new system, framework, policy, or online community
design [2]. There is also a tendency in resilience
literature to begin with the community as the chief
object of study [4, 36]. Hence, it is not surprising that
researchers and practitioners interested in social media
and recovery are concerned with extant communities of
practice and what we can learn from them to benefit
future recoveries. However, given how deeply we are
connected to social and mobile media in other
domains, I argue it is just as important to study the
social and psychological effect of these media on those
who are recovering, independent of how they have
been explicitly mobilised to aid those recoveries.
Such an approach exists at the threshold of
disaster data assemblages. That is, while it may at
times forsake the language of data for a more social
and psychological language, it is still focused on the
technological elements leveraged by contemporary
situation awareness systems, namely social and mobile
media and communication networks. Disaster data
assemblages do not disappear as recoveries unfold,
although their persistence must be recontextualised in
relationship to recovery.
7. Conclusion
In this paper I have covered five perspectives on social
media data in disasters, showing how each articulates
problems that can be conceptualised in terms of
disaster data assemblages. Further empirical research
into these issues should keep in mind the
characteristics of these assemblages. This requires a
methodological approach that traces the connections
between heterogeneous entities. This should involve
the comparison and categorisation of these entities,
including technical micro-publics, in regard to how
they treat disaster data, their privacy protocols, and so
forth. Also, as I argued above, emergency managers
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are not digital positivists, and future research should
examine more closely the way they analyse and verify
social media data, and strategically develop their
relationships with VTCs and Web 2.0 companies.
Finally, the subtle effect of everyday social and mobile
media use beyond the limiting focus on communities
of practice suggests itself to ethnographic research
focused on individuals, families and communities who
are recovering from disasters. To my knowledge such
ethnography has yet to be done.
The paper sets out some of the terrain for a an
ongoing research project at the University of
Melbourne and Monash University that looks at how
social media influence disaster recovery. The project is
preparing for many of the research trajectories just
mentioned, including interviews with VTC managers,
Australian Emergency Managers, and an innovative
digital ethnography of two Australian communities
recovering from bushfires. As more critical findings
from these and other projects emerge the new
interdisciplinary dialogues in the field of crisis/disaster
studies will surely bear rich fruit.
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