# Computational Social Science of Disasters: Opportunities and Challenges
## 4 Crisis Informatics
Social informatics goes back to the 1980s, when research interests were primarily focused on the impact of computerization on the quality of work [17; 193]. Social informatics itself is a subfield of socio-technical systems and is concerned with the relations between social and technical systems [194]. The field of socio-technical systems originated in 1950 from interest in optimizing the productivity of postwar industries and at a time when organizations started to be seen not only as social systems but also as technical systems [194]. We can say that crisis informatics is a study of socio-technical systems that can be used in times of disasters. Crisis informatics researchers develop new technology capabilities as information and communication technologies advance and needs in disaster preparation and response practices emerge. ICT for disasters can be developed for use by digital volunteers (on- and off-site citizens, see Section 3.1) to allow them to crowdsource (i.e., micro-task) productively, as well as by disaster managers (formal response agencies) to provide them with contextual information to improve decision-making. This aspect of crisis informatics also enables effective coordination and collaboration between emergency responders and digital volunteers [15; 192]. For example, the lack of existing road information prior to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti complicated the disaster response, but it also motivated citizen volunteers to use crowd-sourcing applications to share and update road information, as it was encountered on the ground. The large number of citizen volunteers resulted in Haiti becoming one of the best mapped road networks [129]. To fully assess and realize the potential of these technologies in times of disasters, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [192] comment that crisis informatics researchers must first understand the ways individuals and organizations \"collect, organize, manage, access, share, coordinate, and disseminate information within communities during crisis situations [192].\" Understanding how victims, managers, and volunteers obtain and use information constitutes a significant part of crisis informatics. Crisis informatics as an inherently digital method is continuously incorporating innovative computational methods. [PERSON]'s [23] book, \"Big Crisis Data\", focuses on methods \"for processing social media messages under time-critical constraints.\" While [PERSON] [23] focused on computational methods, [PERSON]'s [15] book, \"Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response\", discussed crowdsourcing, the interplay between human curators (of satellite and aerial imagery, social media, and text messages), ICT, and the use of artificial intelligence in times of disasters. [PERSON] et al. [187] also reviewed computational methods and applications for social media data retrieval and processing in the crisis informatics literature. Others (e.g., [186; 195]) have discussed the history and the future of crisis informatics and provided a taxonomy of crisis analytics. The field is rapidly growing with continuing improvements to computational techniques (see [196; 197; 198] for examples). Of course, these new methods and new big data have not been immune to criticism. [PERSON] et al. [199] addressed the challenges of social media use for collecting data related to a disaster event and the drawing of conclusive inferences from user generated content. The growing number of studies and reviews reflect an increasing interest in the application of crisis informatics to disaster events, particularly in preparedness and emergency response [200]. Interest in integrating crisis informatics with the implementation and use of decision support systems in times of crisis is reinvigorating the application of decision support system research to the disaster field.