This literature has also tackled other forms of digital integration into disaster management (Shklovski et al. 2017), and also why it has become problematic (Mendoza et al. 2012 Dailey and Starbird 2014 Reuter and Spielhofer 2017 Wong-Villacres et al. 2012), positing to be a CSCW concern.Ĭrisis informatics research, which is often connected to the CSCW literature, has examined how messaging about disasters has arisen in social media since 2007 (Palen et al. Through qualitative examination of a large data set of microblog interactions between weather authorities and members of the public, and supplemented by interview data, this research follows the trail of the parsimonious ‘spaghetti plot’ on social media to understand the interactive pursuit of risk interpretation (Eiser et al. 2019), this research further focuses on the ever-present challenge of conveying uncertainty for severe weather hazards. Building upon initial research that examined the diffusion of multiple forms of hurricane risk graphics across a microblogging platform (Bica et al. To this end, this research examines how risk communication happens over social media using the destructive 2017 Atlantic hurricane season as the site of study.

However, exchanges over social media make it possible to examine why interactivity in risk communication is important through the questions, answers, and comments that people make in response to difficult-to-understand representations of risk. This conceptual transformation that is informing industry practice came about independently from the rise of social media. Risk communication of severe weather events is an area of practice that has relatively recently evolved from the enactment of a reductive transmissive model of communication (Shannon 1948 Shannon and Weaver 1963) to a model that builds upon the dialogic ways we come to understand the complex matter of uncertainty (Eosco 2008 Morss et al. 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 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.

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. We then conducted interviews with a sample of the weather authorities after preliminary findings sketched the role that experts have in such communications.

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. 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. 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. Risks associated with natural hazards such as hurricanes are increasingly communicated on social media.

Elisa hurricane track