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1. The Crisis of Designing for Disaster: How to Help Emergency Management During The Technology Crisis We Created

   LaLone, Nicolas; Dugas Toups, Phoebe O; Semaan, Bryan (May 2023, International journal of information systems for crisis response and management)

   Emergency Management (EM) is experiencing a crisis of technology as technologists have attempted to innovate standard operating procedures with minimal input from EM. Unsurprisingly, there has yet to be a success. Instead, technologists have focused on consumer culture and fostered a slow-moving crisis as the gap between what consumers and EM can do is deep. At present, the most ubiquitous aspect of technology in disaster is its capacity to exacerbate response, create new kinds of disaster, and create consumer expectations that EM cannot meet. In the present work, we highlight how and why technological production needs to shift its ontological premises dramatically to meet the needs of technology for first responders. From supporting practice to taking a few steps back from the bleeding edge, we offer a range of suggestions based on the technological capacities of emergency management in the present and in the future. 

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2. The Crisis of Designing for Disaster: How to Help Emergency Management During The Technology Crisis We Created

   LaLone, Nicolas; Dugas, Phoebe O.; Semaan, Bryan (May 2023, Proceedings of the International ISCRAM Conference)

   Emergency Management (EM) is experiencing a crisis of technology as technologists have attempted to innovate standard operating procedures with minimal input from EM. Unsurprisingly, there has yet to be a success. Instead, technologists have focused on consumer culture and fostered a slow-moving crisis as the gap between what consumers and EM can do is deep. At present, the most ubiquitous aspect of technology in disaster is its capacity to exacerbate response, create new kinds of disaster, and create consumer expectations that EM cannot meet. In the present work, we highlight how and why technological production needs to shift its ontological premises dramatically to meet the needs of technology for first responders. From supporting practice to taking a few steps back from the bleeding edge, we offer a range of suggestions based on the technological capacities of emergency management in the present and in the future. 

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3. The Technology Crisis in US-based Emergency Management: Toward a Well-Connected Future

   Lalone, Nicolas; Toups Dugas, Phoebe; Semaan, Bryan (January 2023, Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences)

   For many years, CI has tried to show the value of computational techniques for response to hazard events but has yet to see success outside of post-hoc analyses. Meanwhile, emergency management (EM) has been struggling to cope with the impact of computation. This duality wherein we know technology can be useful yet also complicates EM (and has not yet been fully integrated into EM) is what we dub the technology crisis in EM. To begin to address this crisis and revitalize CI, we argue that it is necessary to develop an inventory of what technologies EM is competent with and to design training that can extend that competency. This research reports a survey of EM Practitioners in the United States. We offer one of the first inventories of EM technologies and technological skills and identify how current EM technological integration issues are a crisis. 

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4. The Technology Crisis in US-based Emergency Management: Toward a Well-Connected Future

   Lalone, Nicolas; Toups Dugas, Phoebe O; Semaan, Bryan (January 2023, Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences)

   For many years, CI has tried to show the value of computational techniques for response to hazard events but has yet to see success outside of post-hoc analyses. Meanwhile, emergency management (EM) has been struggling to cope with the impact of computation. This duality wherein we know technology can be useful yet also complicates EM (and has not yet been fully integrated into EM) is what we dub the technology crisis in EM. To begin to address this crisis and revitalize CI, we argue that it is necessary to develop an inventory of what technologies EM is competent with and to design training that can extend that competency. This research reports a survey of EM Practitioners in the United States. We offer one of the first inventories of EM technologies and technological skills and identify how current EM technological integration issues are a crisis. 

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5. Tipping the scales: how geographical scale affects the interpretation of social media behavior in crisis research

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-021-05193-8  

   Samuels, Rachel; Xie, Jiajia; Mohammadi, Neda; Taylor, John E. (May 2022, Natural Hazards)

   Our relationship with technology is constantly evolving, and how we use technology in disasters has evolved even faster. Understanding how to utilize human interactions with technology and the limitations of those interactions will be a crucial building block to contextualizing crisis data. The impact of geographic scale on behavioral change analyses is an unexplored facet of our ability to identify relative severities of crisis situations, magnitudes of localized crises, and total durations of disaster impacts. Within this paper, we aggregate Twitter and hurricane damage data across a wide range of geographic scales and assess the impact of increasing scale on both the recognition of extreme behaviors and the correlation between activity and damage. The power-law relationships identified between many of these variables indicate a direct, definable scalar dependence of social media aggregation analyses, and these relationships can be used to inform more intelligent, equitable, and actionable social media usage in emergency response. 

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