The spatial knowledge politics of crisis mapping for community development

Brandusescu, Ana; Sieber, Renée

doi:10.1007/s10708-017-9784-9

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Crisis mapping is a form of participatory GIS in which people provide real-time geospatial information about the impacts of natural and technological hazards (Brandusescu and Sieber 2018). The data produced is often faster and more detailed than traditional mapping techniques, and also encourages interaction between large groups of people online.…”

Section: Nonparticipationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Up the Ladder in Rising Waters: Community Science in Infrastructure and Hazard Mitigation Planning as a Pathway to Community Control and Flood Disaster Resilience

Hendricks

Meyer

Wilson

2022

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice

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Public participation is the democratic gateway to more just, inclusive, and resilient communities. However, infrastructure and hazard mitigation planning tends toward topdown, expert-driven processes that fail to meaningfully include communities most at risk of disasters. In this article, we critically examine the potential of citizen science in infrastructure and hazard mitigation planning with a focus on stormwater infrastructure and extreme wet-weather events, as floods are the most common disaster in the US. We review literature on various citizen science approaches, from crowdsourcing to community science, and offer a framework that situates them within Sherry Arnstein's foundational piece on public participation, a "Ladder of Citizen Participation." We discuss the opportunities different participatory methods offer for meaningful public involvement, knowledge generation, and ultimately community control and ownership of stormwater and flood infrastructure. We provide case study examples across the US of how public works departments, emergency management, and related organizations have engaged communities around hazard risks and flooding challenges, and offer recommendations for how these programs can be improved. We conclude that in order to produce data needed to mitigate flood disasters and increase trust and public interest in infrastructure needs, civic participation should be grounded in community science, utilizing a multimedia and technological platform. The methods applied and data generated can be leveraged toward public safety, and provide voice, agency, and power particularly to disenfranchised communities most at risk from current hazards and looming climate change impacts.

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Section: Nonparticipationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Up the Ladder in Rising Waters: Community Science in Infrastructure and Hazard Mitigation Planning as a Pathway to Community Control and Flood Disaster Resilience

Hendricks

Meyer

Wilson

2022

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice

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“…Thus, the database designers' decisions around inclusion-what should this database store?-are equally questions about what should be excluded (Burns, 2014). These exclusionary practices are couched within societal debates about legitimacy, representation, and governmentality, or 'knowledge politics' more broadly (Brandusescu and Sieber, 2017;Elwood and Leszczynski, 2012). Open Calgary's data offerings are exclusive to current government holdings.…”

Section: For Database Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Where’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research

Burns¹,

Wark

2019

Qualitative Research

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Contemporary cities are witnessing momentous shifts in how institutions and individuals produce and circulate data. Despite recent trends claiming that anyone can create and use data, cities remain marked by persistently uneven access and usage of digital technologies. This is the case as well within the emergent phenomenon of the ‘smart city,’ where open data are a key strategy for achieving ‘smartness,’ and increasingly constitute a fundamental dimension of urban life, governance, economic activity, and epistemology. The digital ethnography has extended traditional ethnographic research practices into such digital realms, yet its applicability within open data and smart cities is unclear. The method has tended to overlook the important roles of particular digital artifacts such as the database in structuring and producing knowledge. In this paper, we develop the database ethnography as a rich methodological resource for open data research. This approach centers the database as a key site for the production and materialization of social meaning. The database ethnography draws attention to the ways digital choices and practices—around database design, schema, data models, and so on—leave traces through time. From these traces, we may infer lessons about how phenomena come to be encoded as data and acted upon in urban contexts. Open databases are, in other words, key ways in which knowledges about the smart city are framed, delimited, and represented. More specifically, we argue that open databases limit data types, categorize and classify data to align with technical specifications, reflect the database designer’s episteme, and (re)produce conceptions of the world. We substantiate these claims through a database ethnography of the open data portal for the city of Calgary, in Western Canada.

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“…This scholarship signals the opportunities associated to crowd-sourced information and other sources of big data for the analysis of a variety of social phenomena [26], including crises [27,28], environmental degradation [29], inequalities [30], and disaster consequences and response [31][32][33]. Neogeography has also highlighted how the growing availability and accessibility of user-generated information transforms the comprehension of actors, practices and contents of social-geographical analysis and place-making [34,35], thereby opening new avenues for citizen engagement in knowledge production [36,37] and generating new challenges in terms of quality assurance [38,39] and critical analysis [40].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Twitter-Lived Red Tide Crisis on Chiloé Island, Chile: What Can Be Obtained for Social-Ecological Research through Social Media Analysis?

et al. 2020

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Considering traditional research on social-ecological crises, new social media analysis, particularly Twitter data, contributes with supplementary exploration techniques. In this article, we argue that a social media approach to social-ecological crises can offer an actor-centered meaningful perspective on social facts, a depiction of the general dynamics of meaning making that takes place among actors, and a systemic view of actors’ communication before, during and after the crisis. On the basis of a multi-technique approach to Twitter data (TF-IDF, hierarchical clustering, egocentric networks and principal component analysis) applied to a red tide crisis on Chiloé Island, Chile, in 2016, the most significant red tide in South America ever, we offer a view on the boundaries and dynamics of meaning making in a social-ecological crisis. We conclude that this dynamics shows a permanent reflexive work on elucidating the causes and effects of the crisis that develops according to actors’ commitments, the sequence of events, and political conveniences. In this vein, social media analysis does not replace good qualitative research, it rather opens up supplementary possibilities for capturing meanings from the past that cannot be retrieved otherwise. This is particularly relevant for studying social-ecological crises and supporting collective learning processes that point towards increased resilience capacities and more sustainable trajectories in affected communities.

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The spatial knowledge politics of crisis mapping for community development

Cited by 7 publications

References 38 publications

Moving Up the Ladder in Rising Waters: Community Science in Infrastructure and Hazard Mitigation Planning as a Pathway to Community Control and Flood Disaster Resilience

Moving Up the Ladder in Rising Waters: Community Science in Infrastructure and Hazard Mitigation Planning as a Pathway to Community Control and Flood Disaster Resilience

Where’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research

A Twitter-Lived Red Tide Crisis on Chiloé Island, Chile: What Can Be Obtained for Social-Ecological Research through Social Media Analysis?

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