Paper

What it Takes to Get Passed On: Message Content, Style, and Structure as Predictors of Retransmission in the Boston Marathon Bombing Response Jeannette Sutton, C. Ben Gibson, Emma S. Spiro, Cedar League, Sean M. Fitzhugh, and Carter T. Butts Abstract: Message retransmission is a central aspect of information diffusion. In a disaster context, the passing on of official warning messages by members of the public also serves as a behavioral indicator of message salience, suggesting that particular messages are (or are not) perceived by the public to be both noteworthy and valuable enough to share with others.

Working paper now published as part of the Center for Statistics and the Social Science Working Paper Series: Online Information Behaviors During Disaster Events: Roles, Routines, and Reactions Harrison, McCormick and Spiro Abstract: Social media and Internet-based messaging systems are increasingly important platforms for risk communication. A global audience turns to these tools to seek, disseminate, and curate time-sensitive, emergency information during periods of crisis. Moreover, emergency management organizations report adopting these tools to augment their typical public information functions.

To appear in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’14): Is Anyone Out There? Unpacking Q&A Hashtags on Twitter Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski , Emma S. Spiro, Jorge N. Matias, Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Meredith R. Morris In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with “Q&A” hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle.

New research from project HEROIC was published in the recent issue of Information, Communication & Society. Sutton, J., Emma S. Spiro, B. Johnson, S. Fitzhugh, B. Gibson, and C.T. Butts. (2013) “Warning Tweets: Serial Transmission of Warning Messages During a Disaster Event.” Information, Communication, and Society. Abstract: Serial transmission – the passing on of information from one source to another – is a phenomenon of central interest in the study of informal communication in emergency settings.

Research from the HEROIC team was published in the recent issue of the International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (IJISCRAM). Abstract Informal online communication channels are being utilized for official communications in disaster contexts. Channels such as networked microblogging enable public officials to broadcast messages as well as engage in direct communication exchange with individuals. Here the authors investigate online information exchange behaviors of a set of state and federal organizations during the Deepwater Horizon 2010 oil spill disaster.

Emma Spiro, Ryan Acton and Carter Butts published an article, “Extended structure of mediation: Re-examining brokerage in dynamics networks” in the upcoming issue of Social Networks. Their article revisits the concept of brokerage in social networks, elaborating on the concept of brokerage as a process. Spiro et al. develop a framework for measuring brokerage opportunities in dynamic relational data. Using data on emergent inter-organizational collaborations, they employ the dynamic brokerage framework to examine the relationship between organizational attributes and coordination in the evolving network.