For Mondays class we had Dr. Anthony Robinson from the GeoVISTA come over a talk to our class about mapping technologies and some technologies he has been working on over in the geography lab. The title of his presentation was ; Understanding the geography of crisis informatics through social media.
GeoVista center is a department of Geography at Penn State. He covered many topics but I was specifically interested in the picture of the Red Cross members viewing a map hung on a wall and posting information on it with post-it notes. I also took interest in some of the statistics he had about social media and twitter. The senceplace2 was also interesting, so I decided to blog about all three of these topics.
He mentioned there are thousands of different people who want to see a thousand different maps. On those maps, they want to see a thousand different symbols on the map. So it become very difficult to make everyone happy and provide them with the map and information they are specifically looking for.
HE then went into maps for situational awareness, and how out dated the mapping system currently is. His slide showed a picture of Red Cross first responders looking at a paper map on the wall. The map was loaded with numerous posted notes. Mapping and sharing information with a map on the wall pinned with sticky notes undoubtedly come with many flaws. Once a map fills with post-notes and other information, the maps comes down and is replaced with a new map. Tons of information can be lost in this process. Dr. Robinson also said, How can you share information like this? You can give a twelve by eight map with post-it notes to first responders to take out into the field. So clearly a new mapping system to help share information is needed. But one problem I thought of is; if there is new mapping systems developed to allow information to be shared easily, how do you get the humanitarian organization to share information with each other?
He then went into how emergency management professionals use social media and how they use it. 60% used messing to communicate with other professionals. I was surprised twitter didn’t have the top percentage for emergency management professionals for communicating with each other. On the very next slide it showed a graph that depicted the utility of microblogging tools for emergency tasks. B y microblogging he meant twitter, he said he boss wouldn’t allow him to say twitter for some reason. Anyhow, twitter was most used to disseminating information to the public. This didn’t surprise me at all, after all, we learned in class from student presentations and the class reading that public communicates via twitter about geo-locations and situational awareness s prior to, during and after disasters.
Senseplace2 Geovisualization- is a technology he is working on in the GeoVISTA lab. It basically collects tweets by searching for specific words and maps it out via the location of the tweet. They designed it to crawl Tweets and store all the related information into a database using predefined keywords. They analyze the tweets to identify geographic information like the location, the time zones, and the GPS coordinating. Deterring the location of the tweet is difficult because only a small percent of people tweet their locations, and when they do, it’s usually only the city. The GPS locations are usually easy to determine because people often don’t disable the GPS location on their phones. He then brought up a good point about phones and the GPS locations. He thinks emergency personnel should legally be able to see your GPS location when tweeting about disasters or when making emergency calls. He said this is important to know if the person tweeting was actually around the disaster. So, do you think there should be a law passed that allows emergency responder to be able to see your GPS location if they ever needed to find you in an emergency or disaster? 
Hey Zach,
ReplyDeleteNice synthesis of what Robinson discussed. I thought he made some good points, although it appears that the underlying motivation for SensePlace2 and 1 (using computerized mapping systems to provide visual data) is nothing new and was perhaps the first thing we were introduced to in this class via crowdsourcing maps. Still, I liked his intentions of what he seemed to what to do with the geographic content of Tweets. I think his project seems to be something that one day will be open for all users once the kinks are worked out (or so I hope). If so, it could be one tool that irons out the kinks in collaboration issues. Also, interesting question that you bring up towards the end—the issue of privacy during crises is something that we have just assumed should be bypassed for safety reasons. It seems like in the event of an emergency, all barriers are down because information during that time is highly valuable. I’m not quite sure though---it’s a great question you pose and something that I hoped this class could address more.
Hello Zach,
ReplyDeleteYou covered the materials well of what occurred during class. In response to your final question of "do we think there should be a law allowing emergency responders to find you," I feel that they have every right to locate every person in a given disaster zone. Obviously, this would be an assumption that every person in one of these zones has a cell phone, when we know that about 5-10% of any city population still doesn't have a cell phone. But honestly, one idea that my team came up with in respect to finding people was to develop an app that exists on every cell phone, installed by the manufacturer. The phones would require users to agree or disagree to a form when they receive the phone authorizing police and rescue personnel to utilize your phone's GPS to locate you ONLY in the event of a disaster or natural phenomena. If they agreed to it, their information would be received when the next earthquake happens in their hometown. If they disagreed, or said no, then police wouldn't be able to help them. Some people around the world are totally okay with giving organizations the right to know exactly where they are, after all, we have things like Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook where people post their locations all the time. But when it comes to government entities or rescue groups, there may be some that disagree for various reasons. The idea is surely cool, and honestly, should be something implemented for the safety of citizens in any disaster zone. Perhaps more research could be done on an implementation of such software so that we can save lives in the future?
Tony
Zack,
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I didn’t really have a clue what he was talking about during his lecture, and reading your blog post helped me to understand what he was presenting to our class. What astounded me the most was that he said, and you reiterated that over sixty percent of emergency management professionals use social messaging to communicate with other professionals! Mostly through Twitter! This blew my mind. I mean I knew that most emergency response professionals don’t communicate with each other for bureaucratic or other reasons, but it still shocked me to find that out from Dr. Robinson.
Also I thought that your description of Senseplace2 was very well done. I don’t like the potential uses for bad intentions that it has, but I can easily see how this technology could prove useful for analyzing data. In regards to GPS location of an individual when calling 911; they already have that capability. In fact, it is already accurate enough to GPS locate a caller on any specific floor of a building! You did a great job on this post and definitely helped me understand more of what our speaker was really talking about! Thanks!!!