home | GIS | musings | cartography
| aboutVolunteered geographic information poses unique challenges and limitations for use in research during natural disasters and humanitarian crises. While social media can provide valuable “real time” information and insight into a disaster or crisis, it is important for researchers to think critically about the ways in which they are using personal insights to make meaning, and the impacts that has on norms of personal privacy and consent in regards to data use. The most important source of uncertainty in the use of VGI for research is the way in that social media data is “always partial and incomplete.” Social media information has the potential to be extremely informative and helpful for researchers but it is important to think critically about the way that users themselves use social media to tell stories and craft narratives that don’t always reflect reality. Twitter, in particular, can act as a “contact zone” where “events, technologies and emotions move and develop, and no neat divisions exist between news and the personal.” This is supported by the architecture of social media, particularly Twitter, in the way that tweeting and retweeting can create “information cascades” that bring certain narratives to the front and push others aside. Additionally, there are many voices that are not active on social media whose experiences and insights get overlooked by this kind of research. This creates a problem in that research that relies on VGI often assumes that VGI presents a full, accurate depiction of social discourse, when in fact, the narrative presented in VGI is often intentionally crafted and is not representative of large populations of society.
At the core of the use of VGI are questions of power and consent. Social media and research do not operate in vacuums, and it is evident in projects like Mission 4636, that VGI projects can perpetuate systems of inequality and oppression in the ways that they construct meaning out of information. Mission 4636 gave Haitians a phone number that they could text to report what they saw, but the “uneven mobilities” between Haitians impacted by the disaster and foreign humanitarians who arrived on the scene were reproduced in the project. The information for the project was supplied by local Haitians who were unaware that their messages were being made public. The information supplied by locals was then given meaning by peo ple of the diaspora, who then gave the information to western humanitarians who could choose to act on it. Although the goal of the project was to crowd source information to be used for disaster relief and alleviate problems, the ways in which the information was treated reflected societal power structu res that exploited the more vulnerable for information without their consent further perpetuates inequalities. In their use of VGI, researchers have an obligation to be critical about the ways that their research and information collection is reinforcing power structures and work to overturn them.
Crawford, K., and M. Finn. 2014. The limits of crisis data: analytical and ethical challenges of using social and mobile data to understand disasters. GeoJournal 80 (4):491–502. DOI:10.1007/s10708-014-9597-z