Title
Making Sense of Big Data During Disasters. From Twitter to Tip Lines (Nick Lalon
Record Type
Video
URL
https://youtu.be/Ohxhe7ZVn_w
Contact
Nicolas Lalone
Year
2,022
Publisher
Imara IHG

Summary
Nick Lalone defines crisis informatics as the intersection of technology and human behavior in disasters. He highlights the "speed gap" where social media outpaces official tools, the risks of "big data" overload, and the Boston Marathon case, where crowd-sourced verification failed and fueled misinformation.
Description
In this session, Nick Lalone (Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska at Omaha; iSchool / sociology background) explains what crisis informatics is and why building technology for emergency management is much harder than it looks.

Picking up where a prior technology-focused talk left off, Malone flips the lens: instead of asking how emergency managers should adopt new tools, he asks what it would take for technologists to design tools that fit real emergency management practice, budgets, workflows, and training realities.

The talk walks through key cases and lessons from crisis informatics research, including how quickly information appears on social media during disasters, why “more data” becomes a problem, and how misinformation can create a second disaster on top of the first.

Key themes covered:

* What is crisis informatics? How ICT (social media, texting, IoT, email, platforms) intersects with emergency management
* The challenge of technology education: how hard it is to teach complex tools when we forget what it felt like to learn them
* A core problem in disasters: information is created at massive scale, requiring automation to sift, verify, and interpret
* A speed lesson: social media posts can appear faster than official tools (e.g., early tweets during an earthquake)
* The “big data” reality: why analysis often happens long after events (and why real-time is so fragile)
* Boston Marathon bombing case: crowd investigation, media attention shifting toward Reddit, and how verification chains can break

This session is especially useful for emergency management students, crisis informatics researchers, public sector technologists, and anyone designing tools for disaster response.