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January 2006
Assistant Professor Leysia Palen
was recently awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by the
National Science Foundation. The Program is a Foundation-wide activity that
offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of the early
career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively
integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their
organization. Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of
integrated contributions to research and education. Her work is titled Data
in Disaster: Socio-technical Change in Response Agency & Public
Communications. From the abstract:
This project will conduct interdisciplinary, socio-technical research and
education that address the current and potential uses of information technology
in disaster contexts. The research will examine how data generation and sharing
activities by response agencies and the public place new demands on information
dissemination processes between these two entities. The research design
includes field studies of citizen-generated textual, visual, and digital
communications, and of the incident intelligence and public information officer
functions in natural hazards events such as wildfires and hurricanes. Results
will be in the form of ethnographically-informed models of interaction,
data-generation and data-sharing activity that in turn will be put in
organizational and institutional context to formulate recommendations for
innovators, emergency response practitioners and policy makers engaged in
emergency response reform.
Attention to disaster warning, response and recovery is high and widespread,
coming from the federal government, national agencies, the private sector and
academia. Technological innovation and emergency response reform mean that the
relationships between the public and response agencies are becoming more
complex. People are natural information seekers and, in uncertain situations
like disaster, will persist in integrating information from formal and informal
sources to make sense of it. Increased access to camera phones, phone text and
picture messaging, and personal Global Positioning System technology means that
the communications the public naturally engages in following a disaster produce
data that can be appropriated into the response effort. The challenge lies in
how this new data pathway could and should be incorporated into response agency
activity. For agencies, the rise of GPS capability coupled with geographic
information systems is changing the kind and amount of data that incident
intelligence can produce not only for incident command but also for an
increasingly tech-knowledgeable public. Through these activities, the very
interface between agencies and the public is changing. The older, completely
linear model of authorities-to-public affairs-to-news media is outmoded and is
being replaced by a much more complex model of information dissemination. How
can the interface between response agencies and the public better organize and
encourage two-way communication and participation?
An important educational goal of this project is to develop future
practitioners and researchers who appreciate the complexities of designing
policy, processes, and technologies for the highly dynamic situations of
disaster. The success of the research relies on a vertically integrated
education and training program that includes practitioner and other subject
matter expert involvement and a partnership with the Natural Hazards Center.
It leverages research to produce a database of modules for use in courses and
outreach activities where either domain,methodological or theoretical
instruction is needed. Partnership with the National Center for Women and
Information Technology is intended to increase the participation of women in
the future science and engineering workforce by using examples from this
research to illustrate the changing face of information technology careers.
The research, education, and results dissemination efforts are built on
interdisciplinary partnerships with government agencies and academic
institutions, and will launch activities that join fields of research and
practice. Results will be disseminated to developers, practitioners, and
policy makers in ways that are useful to them.
The approximately $600,000 award is expected to fund the research over a
five-year period.
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