# Computational Social Science of Disasters: Opportunities and Challenges
## 4 Crisis Informatics  
The application of new computational methods to traditional fields of science has spawned numerous computational branches, such as digital anthropology, computational linguistics, and biometrics. As its name suggests, crisis informatics is a subfield of informatics, in particular, of social informatics, and can be defined as the study of the design, uses, and consequences of information and communication technologies in times of crisis [10]. As ICTs, IoT, and social media pervade every aspect of our lives, crisis informatics has increasingly become a critical tool in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery [180]. Additionally, information management problems and ineffective use of these technologies have been cited as major factors for failures in disaster management [181]. In the early days of crisis informatics research, many studies employed qualitative methods for both data collection and processing. Researchers manually monitored the ICTs, and they manually curated and classified the information. These studies could be considered mostly descriptive and used formative and interpretivist forms of inquiry (e.g., [182; 183; 184]). Recent advancements in computational and mobile technologies, the open-source culture, adoption of open data policies by companies and governments (e.g., [185]), and the popularity of social media platforms have made studies in crisis informatics both qualitative and quantitative, but the more recent studies of crisis informatics have been computational (e.g., [23; 186; 187]). [PERSON] et al. [182] completed an ethnographic study of a human-induced crisis to understand what aspects of ICT were used, when they were used, and how they were used in the days following the 2011 Virginia Tech shooting event. In that study, [PERSON] et al. [182] conducted 56 on-site, one-on-one, face-to-face interviews and manually monitored online activities of interviewees on social media sites including Facebook, Wikipedia, and Flickr. As a subset of the study, several Facebook groups as well as Wikipedia editors participated in an online, collective problem-solving task to build the list of victims before Virginia Tech officially released the names. The study found that no single online community group was able to come up with a complete list of victim names. Additionally, none of the online lists had false positives, i.e., people incorrectly listed as victims [182]. Another research effort [183] completed a qualitative longitudinal analysis of six disasters as documented by Flickr postings, which was the most popular photo sharing platform at the time of the study. Among the findings was norm development through finding group purpose or tagging nomenclatures as features of photographic contents were compared, categorized, and discussed. [PERSON] et al. [188] used triangulation techniques with place names paired with geo-location information in tweets and Flickr to delineate the extent of a wildfire, and [PERSON] et al. [189] used network analysis to identify distinct communities and influential actors from Zika-related tweets. When we look at the definitions in the literature, we see that the focus of crisis informatics has been on the design and development of ICTs. Crisis informatics:  
* \"includes empirical study as well as socially and behaviorally conscious ICT development and deployment [182]\",
* \"strives for socially and behaviorally informed development of ICT for crisis situations [181]\",
* \"investigate[s] socio-technical interactions that occur during times of extreme crisis with an eye towards developing ways to support the mitigation of suffering [190]\", and
* \"is dedicated to finding methods for sharing the right information in a timely fashion during [significant crises] [191].\"  
The theoretical foundations of crisis informatics can be found in social informatics and even earlier in socio-technical systems [192].