Disaster events – which can arise from meteorologic, geologic, technologic, or biologic hazards – have long served as sites to investigate socio-behavioral phenomena. Their disruption to and suspen...

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a publication that offered resources for the Black traveler from 1936 to 1966. More than a directory of Black-friendly businesses, it also offered articles that provided insights for how best to travel safely, engagement with readers through contests and invitations for readers to share travel stories, and even civil rights advocacy. Today, a contemporary counterpart to the Green Book is Black Twitter, where people share information and advocate for their community. By conducting qualitative open coding on a subset of Green Book editions as well as tweets from Black Twitter, we explore similarities and overlapping characteristics such as safety, information sharing, and social justice. Where they diverge exposes how spaces like Black Twitter have evolved to accommodate the needs of people in the Black diaspora beyond the scope of physical travel and into digital spaces. Our research points to ways that the Black community has shifted from the physical to the digital space, expanding how it supports itself, and the potential for research to strengthen throughlines between the past and the present in order to better see the possibilities of the future.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a tool used by the Black community to navigate systemic racism throughout the U.S. and around the world. Whether providing its users with safer roads to take or businesses that were welcoming to Black patrons, The Negro Motorist Green Book fostered pride and created a physical network of safe spaces within the Black community. Building a bridge between this artifact which served Black people for thirty years and the current moment, we explore Black Twitter as an online space where the Black community navigates identity, activism, racism, and more. Through interviews with people who engage with Black Twitter, we surface the benefits (such as community building, empowerment, and activism) and challenges (like dealing with racism, appropriation, and outsiders) on the platform, juxtaposing the Green Book as a historical artifact and Black Twitter as its contemporary counterpart. Equipped with these insights, we make suggestions including audience segmentation, privacy controls, and involving historically disenfranchised perspectives into the technological design process. These proposals have implications for the design of technologies that would serve Black communities by amplifying Black voices and bolstering work toward justice.

Abstract Risks associated with natural hazards such as hurricanes are increasingly communicated on social media. For hurricane risk communication, visual information products—graphics—generated by meteorologists and scientists at weather agencies portray forecasts and atmospheric conditions and are offered to parsimoniously convey predictions of severe storms. This research considers risk interactivity by examining a particular hurricane graphic which has shown in previous research to have a distinctive diffusion signature: the ‘spaghetti plot’, which contains multiple discrete lines depicting a storm’s possible path. We first analyzed a large dataset of microblog interactions around spaghetti plots between members of the public and authoritative weather sources within the US during the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. We then conducted interviews with a sample of the weather authorities after preliminary findings sketched the role that experts have in such communications. Findings describe how people make sense of risk dialogically over graphics, and show the presence of a fundamental tension in risk communication between accuracy and ambiguity . The interactive effort combats the unintended declarative quality of the graphical risk representation through communicative acts that maintain a hazard’s inherent ambiguity until risk can be foreclosed. We consider theoretical and practice-based implications of the limits and potentials of graphical risk representations and of widely diffused scientific communication, and offer reasons we need CSCW attention paid to the larger enterprise of risk communication.