Reports, Digital Library Research Laboratory

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Browsing Reports, Digital Library Research Laboratory by Subject "Crises"

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    CTRnet: Project Proposal to NSF
    Fox, Edward A.; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (2009)
    Crises and tragedies are, regrettably, part of life; a recent sample, showing the small number of collections preserved at the Internet Archive, is shown in Table 1. While always difficult, recovery from tragic events may be increasingly facilitated and supported by information and communication technology (IC1). Individuals, groups, and communities are using ICT in innovative ways to learn from these events and recover more quickly and more effectively. During and after a crisis, individuals and communities face a confusing plethora of data and information, and strive to make sense by way of that data [114]. They seek to carry out their usual activities, but want to be informed by new insights. They work to help others, or to receive help, but the context and technologies involved in communication today (e.g., Internet, WWW, online communities, mobile devices) make it exceedingly difficult to integrate content, community, and services. Accordingly, individuals and communities respond by attempting to meet their needs with the tools they have, e.g., creating a Facebook group to quickly inform members who is OK, and other groups to share pictures, comments, and additional contributions.
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    A Database Driven Initial Ontology for Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery
    Sheetz, Steven D. (2011-05-01)
    Many databases and supporting software have been developed to track the occurrences of natural disasters, manmade disasters, and combinations of the two. Each of the databases developed in this context, define their own representations of a disaster that describe the nature of the disaster and the data elements to be tracked for each type of disaster. The elements selected are not the same for the different databases, yet they are substantively similar. One capability common to many ontology development efforts is to describe data from diverse sources. Thus, we began our ontology development process by identifying several existing databases currently tracking disasters and derived the "ontology in situ" of their database. That is, we identified how the designers of the databases classify the types of disasters in their systems. We then merged these individual ontologies to identify an ontology that includes all of the classifications from the databases. Several aspects of disasters from the databases were highly consistent and therefore fit well together, e.g., the types of natural disasters, while others, e.g., geographic descriptions, were idiosyncratic and do not fit together seamlessly. The resulting ontology consists of 185 elements and has the potential to support data sharing/aggregation across the databases considered.
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    NSF 2nd Year Report: CTRnet: Integrated Digital Library Support for Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery
    Fox, Edward A.; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Sheetz, Steven D.; Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (2011-07-01)
    One of the important parts of this project is to collect and archive as much information as possible about various events that are related to crises, tragedies, and recovery (CTR). In order to do long-term archiving of information, we have worked with the Internet Archive (IA), a non-profit organization, whose goal is to archive the Internet. IA provides access to web crawlers that can be used to selectively crawl and archive webpages. In disaster situations, it is well known that people use micro-blogging sites such as Twitter to reach their family and friends especially when their cell phones are not working due to high volume of traffic on the cell phone network. For this reason, tweet posts sometimes report CTR events faster than the mainstream news media. Those tweets often contain more detailed information, too, reported by the affected people on the site. We have been archiving tweets (i.e., posts from Twitter.com) for both man-made and natural disaster events. Collected tweets can be exported in various formats including XSL, JSON, and HTML -- to be analyzed later using software tools.
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    NSF 3rd Year Report: CTRnet: Integrated Digital Library Support for Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery
    Fox, Edward A.; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Sheetz, Steven D.; Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (2012-07-01)
    The Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery (CTR) network, or CTRnet, is a human and digital library network for providing a range of services relating to different kinds of tragic events, including broad collaborative studies related to Egypt, Tunisia, Mexico, and Arlington, Virginia. Through this digital library, we collect and archive different types of CTR related information, and apply advanced information analysis methods to this domain. It is hoped that services provided through CTRnet can help communities, as they heal and recover from tragic events. We have taken several major steps towards our goal of building a digital library for CTR events. Different strategies for collecting comprehensive information surrounding various CTR events have been explored, initially using school shooting events as a testbed. Many GBs worth of related data has been collected using the web crawling tools and methodologies we developed. Several different methods for removing non-relevant pages (noise) from the crawled data have been explored. A focused crawler is being developed with the aim of providing users the ability to build high quality collections for CTR events focused on their interests. Use of social media for CTRnet related research is being explored. Software to integrate the popular social networking site Facebook with the CTRnet digital library has been prototyped, and is being developed further. Integration of the popular micro-blogging site Twitter with the CTRnet digital library has proceeded well, and is being further automated, becoming a key part of our methodology.
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    NSF Year 1 Report for CTRnet: Integrated Digital Library Support for Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery
    Fox, Edward A.; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Sheetz, Steven D.; Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (2010-07-08)
    The Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery network, or CTRnet, is a human and digital library network for providing a range of services relating to different kinds of tragic events. Through this digital library, we will collect and archive different types of CTR related information, and apply advanced information analysis methods to this domain. It is hoped that services provided through CTRnet can help communities, as they heal and recover from tragic events. We have taken several major steps towards our goal of building a digital library for CTR events. Different strategies for collecting comprehensive information surrounding various CTR events have been explored, using school shooting events as a testbed. Several GBs worth of school shootings related data has been collected using the web crawling tools and methodologies we developed. Several different methods for removing non-relevant pages (noise) from the crawled data have been explored. A focused crawler is being developed with the aim of providing users the ability to build high quality collections for CTR events focused on their interests. Use of social media for CTRnet related research is being explored. Software to integrate the popular social networking site Facebook with the CTRnet digital library has been prototyped, and is being developed further. Integration of the popular micro-blogging site Twitter with the CTRnet digital library is being explored.
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    Why Students Use Social Networking Sites After Crisis Situations
    Sheetz, Steven D.; Fox, Edward A.; Fitzgerald, Andrew; Palmer, Sean; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Kavanaugh, Andrea L. (2011)
    Communities respond to tragedy by making virtuous use of social networking sites for a variety of purposes. We asked students to describe why they used a social networking site after the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, then evaluated their responses using content analysis. Students went predominately to Facebook (99%). Most (59%) of the 426 students that responded went there because their friends were already there, and to find out if their friends were OK (28%) (and to let them know they were OK). Ideas related to relationships occurred more frequently in the responses than ideas related to the website's features. However, the ease of use of the website was mentioned often (22%). The results suggest this emergent phenomenon will recur.