Social Media during Emergencies: Who am I? Communicative ...€¦ · Head, GeoSocial Intelligence...

Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 1

Social Media during Emergencies: Communicative Approaches to Systems

21st September 2016

A/Prof. Rodney Clarke Director, Collaboration Laboratory (Co-Lab),

SMART Infrastructure Facility,

University of Wollongong, Australia Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 2

Who am I?

A/Prof. Rodney J. Clarke PhD, Docent (KaU, SE), FBCS Foundation Discipline Leader (Operations),

Faculty of Business, University of Wollongong

Director, Collaboration Laboratory (Co-Lab)

Head, GeoSocial Intelligence Research Group (GSI4URL)

SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, Australia

Co-Director, Centre for Responsible Organisations and Practices (CROP)

Manager, Business Research Laboratory (BRL)

Faculty of Business, University of Wollongong

Fellow, Information Systems, Karlstad University, Sweden


Agenda

PetaJakarta: Social Media Citizen Flood Mapping

Some Lessons Learnt

Transitivity- the grammar of experience

Next Steps

Conclusions


PetaJakarta: Social Media Citizen Flood Mapping

Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 5 Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 6




PetaJakarta Social Media Citizen Flood Mapping

the PetaJakarta social informatics research

program

harvest social media build flood maps

is the result of use?

does PetaJakarta provide the best way of

doing it?

is there a ‘best’ way?



PetaJakarta Accolades …

it actually is supported by a Twitter Data Grant (2014) only 6

were ever given globally

social media commentators like Patrick Meier, famous US-

based Humanitarian Technologist, have lauded this system as

the exemplar of social media emergency system

research cited by AU House of Representatives and the US FCC

as the best example of citizen communication

the system has been showcased in Red Cross’s Global Report

2015

one of the state government experts Tony Sloan is of a view that

the best emergency system is the one that’s actually used


PetaJakarta Accolades

it has been consistently advocated as a defining Global

Challenges Program

its actually used as advertising on the sides of local buses



the fact that severe flooding is becoming a recurring and

intensifying disaster due to accelerated geomorphological

subsidence, intense precipitations and sea-level rise have

encouraged local authorities to trust citizens in helping them

to better prepare, adapt and respond to severe flooding

events.

during the next flooding season, it is expected that

PetaJakarta.org will access and treat data from automated

monitoring stations and drone-embarked cameras in order

to supplement citizen-driven information, reinforcing the

hybrid nature of this socio-technical system



during the flooding season 2014/2015

approximately 1.7 million impressions associated with @petajkt were

traced

69,000 users accessed PetaJakarta.org website to retrieve information

compared to 2,000 tweet confirmed contributions- this free-riding use of

a citizen-driven mapping system

perhaps best to target this behaviour with a media campaign before the

start of the next flooding season, unfortunately it is likely to be a

‘tragedy of the commons’

this use is way above any other flood information sources

available in Jakarta- rapid appropriation by BPBD DKI Jakarta,

decreasing their reporting time from 6 hours to 20 minutes



PetaJakarta has proven to be both robust and efficient at

providing relevant information to citizens and emergency

response officers

the project has achieved in one year more tangible operational

gains than previous attempts to equip BPBD DKI Jakarta with

more sophisticated analytical and visualization tools

these results were made possible by harnessing the most

effective ubiquitous sensing network in Jakarta: its residents and

their mobile phones.

Jakarta, with its ten million residents and one of the highest rates

of tweet per capita and per day in the world, was a perfect social

laboratory to implement the project Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 24


evaluating the quality of the engagement will need more time

observing whether the number of active contributors

increases and current active citizens maintain their

commitment to the system will constitute relevant

indicators.



PetaJakarta.org is a web-based platform used to harness the

power of social media to gather, sort, and display

information about flooding for Jakarta residents in real time

two main components:

the first major subsystem is the Twitter harvester and it works in a

relatively simple fashion by identifying hashtags or parsing tweet

content for the existence of a small set of ‘hot terms’ like flooding,

inundation and pooling in both Bahasa Indonesia and English

open source software known as CogniCity- a GeoSocial Intelligence

framework developed at the SMART Infrastructure Facility- that

allows urban data to be collected and disseminated by community

members through their location-enabled mobile devices





Some Lessons Learnt


Some Lessons Learnt

PetaJakarta relies on the (cultural) socio-technical contexts-

some are unique to Jakarta (some of which have been

already described)

PetaJakarta’s (cultural) social-technical contexts are so

specific that for example, in order to apply this system in

Australian emergency contexts, the harvester subsystem

will need to change for use in lower message volume,

heterogeneous platforms mix environments like those to be

found in Australia

more effort will therefore need to be made in order to

actually analyse, rather than simply filter, the social media

content Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 42

Some Lessons Learnt

CogniCity employs statistical approaches to analyse

collected tweets centered on the analysis of word

frequencies to indicate significance and combined with

standard text mining approaches look for the occurrence

and collocation of key words associated with flooding

hazards in Jakarta

as useful as statistical approaches are, they can only

consider what was said; that is, they utilize only the lexical

(wording) aspects of social media messages


Some Lessons Learnt

the filtering approach employed by PetaJakarta is incapable

of determining the meanings of these messages

some examples are useful in demonstrating some of the

issues with a purely stop-list/filter problem:

pinned on the map as a flood report

it reminds me of the lead up to the flood of 1968 [recollections ≠ floods]

I imagine that this flood may be the worst [future imagination]

these are referring to floods but will not be used as a flood report

I hope that everyone will be safe [ + in the flood]

still the same [ = it’s still flooded]

and many, many more examples that could be constructed


Some Lessons Learnt

the use of hashtags in emergency contexts is particularly

problematic

it is simply not possible to assume that a hashtag is a reference to

the immediate situation faced by a social media user.

it is just as likely to be used as a theme to indicate solidarity with a

population conditioned to routine flooding events. In this case the

utility of hashtags to indicate emergency circumstances experienced

by social media users is very low

the problem with using this kind of approach is that no

attempt is being made to produce any form of semantics

associated with the use of the terms


Some Lessons Learnt Why Semantics is Important?

False Positives (not about flooding at all)

‘My heart is flooded with emotion!’

‘I am inundated with emails!’

‘There is a flood of interest in our produce.’

‘Pooling the debt together forms a new asset!’

False Negative (these really are about flooding)

‘Still the same’ (but the attached image shows deep flood waters)

‘Rising’ or ‘Falling’ (refer to a state relation associated with flooding)

‘Sure is damp here’

‘I need my gumboots’ (a behaviour suggestive of flooding)


Some Lessons Learnt Research Question: What does this mean?


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Experiential Metafunction



much of the issues with PetaJakarta involve a complete lack

of understanding about how social media works as

communication

Initial work at the Collaboration Laboratory and SMART

Infrastructure Facility, is defining the conceptual

foundations for research work involving semantics of social

media

we need to focus on the grammar of experience if we are

going to try to use social media as a way of understanding

flooding



from a functional linguistic perspective whenever we speak

or write there are three distinct kinds of meanings that can

be made simultaneously (language is designed to do this)

these distinct kinds of meanings are called metafunctions,

the one we are interested in here is called:

ideational metafunction: allows experiences to be represented in

language. The ongoing flow of experience can be described in

language as discrete changes to experience that are the ordered into

language. Therefore this metafunction has two corresponding

modes:

experiential mode (also known as the experiential metafunction) the

resources used to construe 'goings on'- well concentrate on this, and

logical mode the resources for creating 'complexes' of experience


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Processes: External, Consciousness & Relational

associated with is the grammar of experience called transitivity-

distinction between an ‘exterior world’ and an ‘interior world’- evident in

the first 3-4 months of life- reflected in the grammar in a distinction

between ‘processes of the external world’ and ‘processes of

consciousness’

processes of the external world are represented in terms of actions and

events a swells people or other entities (say sensors or machines) making

them happen

processes of consciousness involve the less discrete inner experiences of

perception, emotion and imagination-perhaps a self-conscious recording of

the unfolding of some event, recollection of past events, a reflection upon or

relation to them

needs a third component- relational processes that enable us to move from

instances of experience to generalisations about experience


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Process Types- Some Preprocessing Steps …

to identify transitivity, several pre-processing steps are

required:

each social media message (post/comment) must be separated into

distinct modes and their associated workflows

we only want the language component for a transitivity analysis- note

that other compatible Systemic Semiotic methods can be applied to the

semantics of images, video etc (Al Mansour 2013, Mehmet 2014, Mehmet

and Clarke 2016a)

we need to excluded unneeded language which are not needed for a

transitivity analysis- generally @ accounts, #hashtags

break apart the remaining text into discrete messages or clauses by

performing a so-called clause boundary analysis (CBA)


Social Media Platform

Media Modalities

Semiotic Resources

Semiotic Methods

has

consists of

studied by

Twitter

SMS Text (plus Hypertext, Hashtags, Handles); Image, Video (plus Streaming Video

additional Apps- eg. Meerkat, Periscope), plus optional Geo-positioning

SFL (Text): Transitivity- Grammar of Experience;

Social Semiotics (Image): Representational Meanings- Ideational Metafunction,

Interactive Meanings- Interpersonal Metafunction) and Compositional Meanings-

Textual Metafunction

SFL (Text): Figure- Processes, Participants and Circumstances;

Social Semiotics (Image): Narrative- Action Processes, Reactional Processes and

Circumstance; Symbolic- Salient Objects, Subjects, and Things

Transitivity- the grammar of experience Process Types- Some Preprocessing Steps …


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Process Types- Introduction

transitivity recognises

distinct kinds of experience

that can be represented in

language called process

types

transitivity consolidates a

huge diversity of possible

events into a small number

of generalised process types

six in all- major process

types have subcategories

material

relational

mental

verbal

behavioural

existential

clause

-

circumstance

attributive

identifying


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Process Types- Descriptions 1

pr:material describe processes of doing and action

I'm crossing the flooded street

pr:mental involve related to the packaging of experience in the

form of cognition (verbs of thinking, knowing and understanding),

affection (verbs of liking and fearing) and perception (verbs of

seeing, hearing)

I hate crossing the flooded street

pr:verbal processes are processes of verbal actions- saying

I asked him for the situation report

pr:behavioural are considered 'half way' between material and

mental processes, for example, breathe, cough, look at, dream,

frown, grin, laugh, think on, watch etc (Eggins 2004)

We cried together


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Process Types- Descriptions 2

material, mental, verbal and behavioural process types ‘encode action

meaning’ whereas existential and relational process types encode eating

about ‘states of being’ (Eggins 2004, 237)

pr:existential processes are process types “where things are stated to

exist” eg. arise, occur, exist etc

There was rubbish everywhere

pr:relational processes are things stated to exist in relation to other

things (assigned attributes and identities- two functions:

identifying relational processes- 'x serves to define the identity of y' and

attributive relational processes- 'x is a member of class a' or 'x carries the

attribute of a'

The best suburb in Wollongong is West Wollongong


Material Mental

RelationalB

ehavio

ural

VerbalExistential

Processes of the External World Processes of Consciousness

Transitivity- the grammar of experience Process Types- Diagrammatic View


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Circumstances 1

Circumstances can be associated with each process types.

extent

duration how long?; 'I've caught the train hundreds of times'

distance how far?; 'I stayed up all night'

location

time when?; 'I found out about the flooding last night'

place where?; 'It flooding in the park'

manner

means how?, with what?; 'We walked for ages'

quality how?; 'With new storm drains, the floods won't be so bad'

comparison what like?; 'Unlike Wollongong, I feel unsafe here?'


Transitivity- the grammar of experience Circumstances 2

cause

reason what for?; 'To avoid getting caught, the thieves don't go to

the CBD'

purpose why?; 'Thanks to the SES, Wollongong is safe'

behalf who?, who for?; 'You have to be strong for their sake'

accompaniment with whom? 'With or without you, it will

work!'

matter what about?; 'As for the insurance company, they

gave no support'

role what as?; 'As a resident, I was glad to see the progress'


Next Steps


Next Steps Emergency Semiospheres under Normal Conditions ...

examining transitivity processes enables social media

platforms traffic to be considered experientially

these methods are social media platform agnostic, so let's

just refer to them as abstract 'spaces' of meaning or

semiospheres (Lotman 1998, 2005)

this free us from being bogged down in the details and specificities

of any particular platform, and

as meanings are often shared across and between platforms, a

phenomenon called themed clusters (Mehmet 2013)

as communicated using social media platforms, experience

ebbs and flows as described using the communicative

resources of process type


Next Steps Emergency Semiospheres under Normal Conditions ...

by analyzing social media messages (tweets) for process

type, we can estimate the usual proportions of process type

in the semiosphere

in this way what counts as normal process activity in the

social media semiosphere can be characterized

there will be a degree of volatility in the occurrence of

particular kinds of processes in the semiosphere




@petajkta It’s flooding around here. I’m not going to leave #banjir

Pro. Verb Preposition Phrase

Pr:materialActor BehaverC:location: Place (spatial)

Word Class

Functional Behaviour

Adj PrepProCont Adv Verb

Clause 1 Clause 2

Behavioural ProcessMaterial Process




Word Class



Clause 1 Clause 2


Preprocessing

initially separate the ‘language’ from the social

media platform artefacts eg. handles and

hashtags

apply Clause Boundary Analysis (CBA) this

can be a tricky processing step because of

clause complexes (rather than the simple ones

shown here) – its not just about full stops and

commas!

Use WordNet together with Python and NLTK

library and similar to provide candidate word

classes (parts of speech) to words

Functional Processing

Use the verbs to identify candidate processes

(underlined)- create our own process

dictionaries

Use the constituency pattern (realisation

statement) associated with processes to check

the interpretation or distinguish between

alternate interpretations if they exist.





Word Class



Clause 1 Clause 2





Word Class



Clause 1 Clause 2


Processes

Realisation Statements for processes

within the so-called Transitivity

System Network (left) means that a

material process consists of a

mandatory constituent called an Actor

[+ = has] with three optional

constituents Gaol, Range and

Beneficiary

probes or identity questions are asked

of the clause to determine if the

constituent exists or not- remember

there can be conflicting

interpretations) eg. What did It do?





Word Class



Clause 1 Clause 2


Circumstances

these involve all the information relating to

processes and are considered a second

system from which we select when providing

ancillary information about processes

(although some circumstances are likely to co-

occur with particular processes more often

than others)

generally occur where there are adverbial

groups or prepositional phrases (as above in

Clause 1)




Word Class



Clause 1 Clause 2



Next Steps Relevance to Emergencies

clearly process types are incredibly significant for describing

experience during emergencies

material processes: emphasize happenings (events) or doings (actions)

mental processes: sensed (perception), though (cognition), or felt

(affection)

while material and mental processes will represent the largest

amount of processes, the proportion of processes will change as an

emergency

those processes not engaged in happenings or descriptions of

things will fall away replaced by an abundance of material processes

of both subcategories- events and actions- and to a lesser mental

processes of a specific subcategory- perception


Next Steps Maps of Experience | Geo-spatial/temporal Statistics

the beautiful thing is that these processes can be mapped

using a standard technique called thematic mapping

you can show each process as a layer

as with Photoshop and then you can turn layers on and off and

combine them in useful ways

over time, knowedge will develop about which process

types and combinations signal different experiences are

useful to show- panic, orderly withdrawal, reflection, actual

material efforts for example

the spatial arrangement of process types can also be

analysed using well established geo-spatial/temporal

statistics Clarke, R. J. (2016a) Social Media during Emergencies- KaU 70

Spatial Semantics

Functional Semantic

Analysis

Spatial

Science

Social Media

Software

Engineering


Conclusions


Conclusions

applications running on mobile devices that are being used

to acquire empirical emergency information and media to

social media platforms must facilitate the seamless

reporting of experiences encoded in specific process types

especially information and media about relevant events,

actions and perceptions

using social media to attempt to characterise objectively

flooding conditions is a laudable aim but it is also misguided

(see a related talk on NextGen IoT Emergency Sensors)


Conclusions

it misrepresents what social media platforms are good at,

recounting personal experiences and these are encoded in

many kinds of process type and circumstances

using functional analysis of the language of social media

posts/messages effectively provides many

additional dimensions with which to analyse social media

semiospheres

18 new dimensions: circumstances x 7 main kinds of circumstance

with 13 including sub kinds; processes x 6


Conclusions

by employing a functional communication approach we can

consider not only the meanings of what was communicated,

it also becomes possible to explore how a social media

message is organized as an instance of communication.

in other words, we can apply a functional approach to

communication in order to understand which grammatical

resources were used to formulate a given social media

message

this opens up an entirely new approach to the analysis of

social media; one that can be used to describe the

semantics of social media messages in emergency contexts


Conclusions

from a practical perspective, by analysing how social media

messages in emergency situations are organized

grammatically we can exclude a large proportion of

messages that are otherwise irrelevant. Tools could be

developed that use grammar to explore social media

semantics.

In effect, grammar provides many additional categories that

can be used to filter, search and process the large collection

of social media messages that can be collected during

emergencies.


Conclusions

there is a great many possible ‘goings on’ that can comprise

experience and the grammar enables these to be

represented into configurations of process, participants and

circumstances

the technology being developed within the GeoSocial

Intelligence group at the SMART Infrastructure Facility to

semantically analyse social media related to emergencies is

called SEM

the kinds of functional semantic analyses provided by SEM,

represents an entirely new approach to social media

description, evaluation and representation


Collaboration Laboratory (Co-Lab)

SMART Infrastructure Facility, Building 6 Room 207

University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia

+ 61 2 4221 3752; +61 2 4221 3218

Web: http://smart.uow.edu.au/uow-collaborators/co-lab.html

Director, A/Prof Rodney J. Clarke

School of Management and Marketing

University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia

T + 61 2 4221 5818; F +61 2 4221 4154

Web 1: http://www.uow.edu.au/commerce/smm/mgmt/mgmtstaff/UOW010750.html

Faculty of Economic Sciences, Communication and IT

Karlstad University, SE-651 88 Karlstad, Sweden

T +46 54 700 18 40 Web 2: https://www.kau.se/forskning/forskdb?to_do=show_researcher&id=3236

Linkedin: http://au.linkedin.com/in/rodneyjclarke

Twitter: clarke_rj Skype: rodney-j-clarke

WordPress: blogs.uow.edu.au/colab

Vimeo: co-labAU


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