My advisor, Leysia Palen, heads Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis) and my research lies within the field of crisis informatics. With colleagues at Project EPIC, I have taken part in several research efforts to analyze the use of Twitter during crises and other mass disruption events. Recently, I have come to concentrate on the organized and self-organizing efforts of digital volunteers to help process information during mass disruption events.
In November 2009, at a Random Hacks of Kindness conference, I co-created the Tweak the Tweet (TtT) concept (Starbird & Stamberger, 2010). Tweak the Tweet is an idea for utilizing the Twitter platform as a two-way communication channel during emergencies, crises, and disasters. Tweak the Tweet seeks to formalize social media updates to make the information shared there more easily processed and redistributed back to the public.
In 2010 and 2011 I have deployed Tweak the Tweet instances to collect, process, and map formatted Twitter data for dozens of crisis events, including the Haiti earthquake, the Chile earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, the Pakistan Floods, Hurricane Tomas, several U.S. snowstorms, flooding in Queensland, tornadoes in the U.S. SE, Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee.
I am currently a member of the Humanity Road organization, which is a digital volunteer organization that seeks to provide timely information to the public during crisis events.
I have also participated in crisis volunteer efforts with CrisisCommons and the Standby Task Force.
Publications:
Starbird, Kate and Leysia Palen. (forthcoming). (How) Will the Revolution be Retweeted? Information Diffusion and the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2012).
Starbird, Kate and Leysia Palen. (2011). “Voluntweeters”: Self-Organizing by Digital Volunteers in Times of Crisis. Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), Vancouver, CA. (26% acceptance rate. Honorable Mention Award, top 5%)
Starbird, Kate, Leysia Palen, Amanda L Hughes, and Sarah Vieweg. (2010). Chatter on The Red: What Hazards Threat Reveals about the Social Life of Microblogged Information. Proceedings of the ACM 2010 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010), Savannah, GA, pp. 241-250. (20% acceptance rate. Honorable Mention for “Best of CSCW,” top 5%)
Vieweg, Sarah, Amanda L. Hughes, Kate Starbird, and Leysia Palen. (2010). A Comparison of Microblogging Behavior in Two Natural Hazards Events: What Twitter May Contribute to Situational Awareness. Proceedings of the ACM 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), Atlanta, GA, pp. 1079-1088. (22% acceptance rate)
Starbird, Kate and Leysia Palen. (2010). Pass It On?: Retweeting in Mass Emergencies. Presented at the 2010 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM 2010), Seattle, WA.
Starbird, Kate and Jeannie Stamberger. (2010). Tweak the Tweet: Leveraging Microblogging Proliferation with a Prescriptive Grammar to Support Citizen Reporting. Presented at the 2010 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM 2010), Seattle, WA.
Starbird, Kate, Leysia Palen, and others. (Forthcoming). Promoting Structured Data in Citizen Communications During Disaster Response: An Account of Strategies for Diffusion of the ‘Tweak the Tweet’ Syntax. In Christine Hagar (Ed.), Crisis Information Management: Communication and Technologies, Cambridge, UK: Woodhead Publishing Limited.