Information School News

Rémy Bossu, Laura Peterson and Charlotte Farras from the Euro-Med Seismological Centre (pictured alongside the iSchool's Dr Paul Reilly and Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova) visited the University last week as part of the EC Horizon 2020 project IMPROVER. The two day workshop (19-20 January), organised by Work Package leader Dr Paul Reilly, brought together researchers from the University of Sheffield and the EMSC to discuss the role of social media in disaster response. Both partners are currently working on two deliverables for IMPROVER, which will focus on public expectations of critical infrastructure during disasters and the role of social media in creating early warning systems for people who live in disaster prone areas. These deliverables will be made available on the project website ( www.improverproject.eu ) later this year. The workshop also marked Dr Atanasova's last contribution to IMPROVER before she leaves the Information School in February 2016. On behalf of Dr...

At the year’s end, LSE Review of Books announced its ten most popular book reviews for 2015 . Among these is a review of Patrick Meier’s ‘Digital Humanitarians’ by Dimitrinka Atanasova from the Information School. Dimitrinka recommends the book to all who wish to make sense of social media and Big Data during crises and disasters. She notes that the book will also appeal to Star Wars fans with its many movie analogies such as the comparison of digital humanitarians with Star Wars Jedi.  In May 2015 Patrick Meier gave a lab talk at the University of Sheffield co-hosted with The Sheffield Institute for International Development and the Information School’s Digital Society Network. More information on Patrick's lab talk can be found here . 

An article co-authored by Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova, Information School and Dr Giuseppe Veltri, University of Leicester, has been published in Public Understanding of Science. Their article ‘ Climate change onTwitter: Content, media ecology and information sharing behaviour’ studied  the content, use of sources and information sharing in over 60,000 tweets using automatic thematic analysis, semantic network analysis and text classification.  Findings about a major role still being played by traditional media come amid increasing media coverage of the United Nations climate conference COP21 taking place in Paris from 30 November until 11 December 2015.