More on the role of Twitter and Texting in Generating Crisis Data

A few months ago, I was interviewed by Danish newspaper Information about Twitter, microblogging, blogs and their relationship to journalism. One of the things I commented on was how I'd observed eyewitness accounts of the violence in Gaza and the recent riots in Oslo spreading through the network via Twitter. The same thing had supposedly also happened during the siege in Mumbai, though that slipped my mind at the time.

This morning, I watched this intriguing video of a short (> 5 mins) talk by Erik Hersman. It gave the answer to one of the things I've been thinking about, namely the enormous problem of how to sort the data that's being generated in a crisis. The first thing people do in a crisis is to reach out to their loved ones, supplying and sharing information, generating rumours and trying to make sense of the crisis phenomenon. The amount of data generated in a crisis very quickly becomes too big to collate and review. Just when you need the data the most, there is too much of it.

Now, the team that Hersman is a part of has built a GoogleMaps mashup that allows you to post data to a centralised map. It has already worked in Kenya, Mumbai and during the recent terror bombing of the civilian population in Gaza.

The next step will be to create a crowdsourced noise filter: harnessing people to rate and sort information. Very clever trick, which will reduce the rumour mill, because another thing that always happens in crises is that unfounded rumours spring up out of nowhere.

I do, however, foresee a problem. This system is going to work a hell of a lot better in crises that aren't generated by other humans. If there is an Earthquake in Los Angeles, this system will help. But what about the bombing of Gaza? In the bombing of Gaza there are two sides both trying to take control of the information. There would be an information war conducted through systems such as this one. Israeli and Palestinian agents would both be actively trying to boost information that favours their side. Therefore, the system would lose part of its meaning. But surely this idea is a spectacularly good one. Watch the talk, it's short and interesting:

Knol

Google takes on Wikipedia. Usually, I'd just be happy for the couple of minor improvements in the technical design over Wikipedia, but for reasons I am not yet completely able to articulate, I am skeptical. I think it has to do with Knol apparently being rigged in the Google results, but maybe this tool will be a supplement to Wikipedia? Whatever happens, it will certainly take many years to reach the level of detail that Wikipedia has.

Btw, one of the internet tricks I use most is to google [topic] + wikipedia. You go straight to the top-ranking Wikipedia article (almost universally the English-language one) and you can use that as the beginning of a research process. It's a nice way of just quickly touching base with the most basic facts about something, and can also be used to find specific information to supplement my vaguer understanding about what I'm researching. Like today, for purposes of a bad joke coming to this space soon, I wanted to double check whether the birth of Derrida did indeed coincide with the birth of New Criticism. It did, sorta.

UPDATE: Ezter Hargittai from Crooked Timber raises some excellent issues here.

Also, I think I have worded my initial skepticism more thoroughly: Google should no longer be just a private company. It has now become such an integral part of the infrastructure of the entire world that it should either act entirely like infrastructure and not as a corporation with a separate agenda from the people it serves or it should be supernationalised, become a UN body. If Google starts rigging the results according to their own agenda, they are no longer doing what they should be doing to fulfill their part of the Google - Public contract.

1) Wolf poses as "grandmother" and kills child, What makes your ears so big? Animal swallows man (not fatally)
2)Victims rescued from swallower's belly.

It seems that bit I wrote about tracing Gibson's Spook Country back to events documented in his blog has now been used by some new media researchers in a lecture, as far as I understand. How cool! Since these appear to be notes taking during the lecture, I'm not quite sure I understand what the lecture is about (creativity and crowdsourcing, I think). But it does look interesting.