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...

Communicating risk to the public in the lead-up to tropical storms has the potential to significantly reduce the impacts on both livelihood and property. While significant research has been conducted in the storm risk community on how people receive, seek, and utilize risk information, given the importance of computing technologies and social media in these activities, human-centered design stands to make important contributions to this area. Drawing on an extensive literature review and 48 interviews with hurricane experts and members of the public, this paper makes three contributions. First, we provide a broad overview of hurricane risk communication. We then offer a set of guiding insights to inform HCI research work in this domain. Finally, we identify 6 opportunities that future human centered design work might pursue. In sum, this paper offers an invitation and a starting point for HCI to take up the problem of hurricane risk communication.

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.

The news landscape has been changing dramatically over the past few years. Whereas news once came from a small set of highly edited sources, now people can find news from thousands of news sites online, through a variety of channels such as web search, social media, email newsletters, or direct browsing. We set out to understand how Americans read news online using web browser logs collected from 174 diverse participants. We found that 20% of all news sessions started with a web search, that 16% started from social media, that 61% of news sessions only involved a single news domain, and that 47% of our participants read news from both sides of the political spectrum. We conclude with key implications for online news, social media, and search sites to encourage more balanced news browsing.

Conveying uncertainty in information artifacts is difficult; the challenge only grows as the demand for mass communication through multiple channels expands. In particular, as natural hazards increase with changing global conditions, including hurricanes which threaten coastal areas, we need better means of communicating uncertainty around risks that empower people to make good decisions. We examine how people share and respond to a range of visual representations of risk from authoritative sources during hurricane events. Because these images are now shared widely on social media platforms, Twitter provides the means to study them on a large scale as close to in vivo as possible. Using mixed methods, this study analyzes diffusion of and reactions to forecast and other risk imagery during the highly damaging 2017 Atlantic hurricane season to describe the collective response to visual representations of risk.

Nepal was struck by two major earthquakes in April and May 2015 which gave rise to much media attention. Because of photographs' power to influence how people perceive significant events, we investigate how these disasters are represented visually through Twitter-shared images in three ways. First, we compare how geotagged image tweets are distributed vis-à-vis the reported damage, to see if a seemingly "objective" method of representation stands up. Second, with an iteratively developed coding scheme, we examine how images are differently produced and shared within global versus local populations and after each earthquake, with the idea that amplification "collectively instructs" what features of the event are most important. Third, we analyze how images from other locations, disasters, and time periods are appropriated as part of the "story" of the disaster event. We found differences in image popularity, with global twitterers emphasizing recovery and relief efforts in their diffusion of images, and locals emphasizing people suffering and major damage in their sourcing and re-sharing. We also found that globals were more likely to appropriate images, evoking lessons from Sontag about "the pain of others" [39].