Hurricane Harvey Field Team

Interested in Learning More?

It takes a lot of people to collect the type of data we needed for our National Science Foundation (NSF) study on how people used social media to call for help during the floods resulting from Hurricane Harvey. In Phase I of our study, our field team collected approximately 40 in-depth interviews with three groups of people: those who needed rescue, volunteers who rescued others, and officials who rescued others. We began collecting data in October 2017 by meeting with people who agreed to share their stories and the photos they took during this disaster.

Publications

So far our team has published two papers at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference in May 2018 and if you click on these references, you can access the full text. Click here for a brief video on citizens communicating health information and click here for a video summary of citizens and rescue roles.

We also have a paper, Training an Emergency-Response Image Classifier on Signal Data, that will be presented at the IEEE 17th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications ICMLA 2018.

Top Paper Panel Human Communication & Technology Division of the National Communication Association

We are very excited that one of our most recent papers was presented at the 2018 National Communication Association Conference on the Top Paper Panel! Click here to watch a brief overview of the paper.Stephens, K. K., Robertson, B. W., & Murthy, D. (2018, Nov.). Throw me a lifeline: The affordances of social media and mobile phones during rescues in Hurricane Harvey. Paper to be presented at the National Communication Association Conference, Salt Lake City, UT. Top Paper Panel Human Communication & Technology Division.

Paper Abstract:
This study uncovers how disaster rescuees draw upon the affordances of social and mobile media to post “calls for help” and get rescued. Guided by Schrock’s (2015) framework on mobile communication affordances, we used a qualitative approach to conduct field interviews that included Photo-Elicitation Interview (PEI) techniques to understand how and why people posted text and images on social media. These findings offer a contribution to human communication and technology research by revealing that when people need to be rescued, and they have ready access to social media via mobile devices, they draw upon the affordances of locatability, multimediality, and availability. Portability functions as a material feature of a mobile device, one that is essential, yet heightens the fragile nature of mobiles in a disaster. The affordance of locatability provides rescuees ways to share their location, find others, and directly communicate. Multimediality provides rescuees opportunities to boost their signals—i.e., calls for help—and rise above the inherently noisy disaster communication arena. Availability is invoked directly and transferred to trusted others because with direct availability also comes the dreaded battery drain, a top limitation of mobile communication during a disaster.