Information School News

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly and Research Associate Dr. Ioanna Tantanasi have published an article entitled ‘Social media’s not all bad- it’s saving lives in disaster zones ‘ for the Conversation UK last week. The piece draws on their  CascEff and IMPROVER work on social media and crisis communication. Thanks to Stephen Harris for his editorial support and the invitation to comment on this issue.

This week, Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly will be presenting two papers at the MeCCSA conference , which will be held at London South Bank University (10-12 January). The first one builds on Dr Reilly's research on social media and contentious politics in Northern Ireland, with the second based on data collected as part of the Horizon 2020 project IMPROVER . The programme for the conference can be found here and the abstracts of Dr Reilly's two talks can be found below: 1) Reilly, P. Loyalists against Democracy: Assessing the role of social media parody accounts in contentious Northern Irish politics Abstract: Parody accounts on social media have emerged as one of the key focal points for the debate of contentious political issues in Northern Ireland over the past five years. Some commentators have praised these accounts for providing a voice for the ‘silent majority,’ while others have condemned what they view as their crude stereotyping of working-class loyalist communitie...

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly is invited speaker at the ESRC CASCADE-NET  Seminar “The role of Civil Society’s agency in governance and contingency planning: citizenship, participation and social learning” today. The seminar, organised by co-Investigator Dr. Martina McGuinness (Management School, University of Sheffield) is held in Inox Dine, Students’ Union Building, University of Sheffield. Dr Reilly's paper is entitled ‘Social media, citizen empowerment and crisis communication during the 2014 UK Floods’ and draws on his recently completed EC FP7 funded research project CascEff . The slides for my presentation can be found here

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly's CascEff research report on the role of social and traditional media in crisis communication has been cited in the UK Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology POSTnote 564: Communicating Risk. Dr Reilly was also one of several UK academics to be an invited reviewer of this publication. It can be downloaded here .

Last week, Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly, along with Dr Tina McGuiness from the Management School, ran an event for local schools entitled 'Could social media help you during a disaster?', as part of the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science. The description of the event was: Can social media help build disaster resilience in Sheffield? What role, if any, should social media users, and young people in particular, play in efforts to mitigate the effects of these incidents in their communities and help keep themselves and others safe? Recent research has suggested that social media can help emergency services during human made and natural disasters through the ‘push and pull’ of crisis information. The eyewitness perspectives shared by citizens on social media can help first responders build situational awareness and identify those areas most in need of assistance. At the same time, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can provide emotional and material support to those affec...

Dr Elisa Serafinelli presented the AESOP Guidelines for effective communication between Critical Infrastructure operators and members of the public during crisis situations at the IMPROVER project workshop that was held at the Joint Research Centre, in Ispra Italy on the 11th and 12th May 2017. Recommendations included: creating platforms and/or channels of communication that can provide feedback about CI operators’ services before, during and after a major incident. The guidelines was published along with the deliverables for task 4.2. Researchers, operators and the IMPROVER consortium joined forces for two days of presentations, knowledge sharing, and networking. The workshop was also an opportunity to present IMPROVER project activities and results in order to get feedback from critical infrastructures (CI) operators.

Dr Paul Reilly of the Information School is the UK Principal Researcher and Work Package Leader on the ‘ CascEff: Modelling of dependencies and cascading effects for emergency management in crisis situations’ project. The Sheffield team, consisting of Dr Reilly and Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova, aims to identify examples of good practice for public communication during both natural and human-made crises. They will focus on how citizen and professional journalists have contributed to the information flows that emerge during such incidents. This EU PF7 funded project began in March 2014 and the Sheffield team are responsible for conducting interviews with key agencies involved in incident management; framing and content analysis of news media coverage and analysis of social media content. A copy of the deliverable, ‘A strategy for communication between key agencies and members of the public during crisis situations,” can be found here.