IJHCI Special Issue “Social Media in Crisis Mana­gement”

03.03.2018

CYSEC-PI Prof. Christian Reuter co­edited Vol. 34/4 of the Inter­national Journal of Human–Computer Inter­action

Prof. Christian Reuter

Social media is gaining more and more importance in crisis management: It continues to evolve, and so does their use in emergency and crisis events. Related research is sometimes called “crisis informatics”.

To address current research CYSEC-PI Christian Reuter (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany), Amanda Lee Hughes (Utah State University, USA), Starr Roxanne Hiltz (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA), Muhammad Imran (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar) and Linda Plotnick (Lafayette College, USA) edited a special issue of the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (Vol. 34/4, 2018) one of the major journals in the field.

This special issue was initiated based on the track “Social Media Studies” at previous ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) conferences. It is usually one of the tracks with the most submissions; however, the editors also invited scholars from other venues to contribute.

The aim of this special issue is to showcase current research on how the use of social media can help in crisis management and response. The editors thus selected papers which provide rich description and/or evaluation of the design and/or actual use of social media for collaboration and/or widespread participation in any phase of crisis management, from initial planning and preparedness, through detection, response, and recovery phases. Of the 15 submitted papers, seven articles (one editorial and six research papers) were accepted for publication:

The special issue on “Social Media in Crisis Management” includes a comprehensive review (first article), technical findings for quality assessment (second article) and image processing (third article). The researchers then present results from case studies to elaborate theories around sense-making (fourth article) and sharing behavior (fifth article). The last article provides results from quantitative surveys on perceived barriers for social media use by emergency managers (sixth article).

Contact

Prof. Dr. Christian Reuter, TU Darmstadt, Department of Computer Science, research group „Science and Technology for Peace and Security“ (PEASEC)