Blog

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZDMC 2012 is Chris Fisher from the Queensland Department of Community Safety, who presents DCS’s ‘All Hazards’ approach to integrated information management. This is especially important in the context of disasters, in order to accelerate the provision of essential information to stakeholders and the public. But this is limited by existing barriers and silos – and it cannot simply be addressed through better information technology.

Disasters do not respect borders or organisational boundaries – and to address this, ‘All Hazards’ became an informational problem-solving exercise. It was an important recognition of ‘information’ as an independent …

Brisbane.
OK, after a brief power outage (why are there never enough outlets in conference facilities?), I’m back to blog the afternoon sessions at ANZDMC 2012. We begin with a presentation by Paul Salmon, who will apply systems theory to the disaster response context.

Disaster preparation, response and recovery processes are complex sociotechnical systems. They have shorter and longer timeframes, and small events can have huge implications well down the track. This means that systems theory models can be applied to the study of these processes: complex systems comprise various levels (relating to the various stakeholders in the process) …

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZDMC is Paul Pisasale, the Mayor of Ipswich (which was also severely affected in the 2011 south-east Queensland floods, of course). Paul is currently in re-election mode, so he starts with a bit of a sales pitch for Ipswich.

He notes the problems of talking to the media during the crisis: while the disaster management team might have known what a prospective flood level of 18m meant, the media largely didn’t, and this had the potential of causing substantial stress for the community – so there needed to be clear communication strategies for getting the …

Brisbane.
Over the next couple of days, I’m at the Australia New Zealand Disaster & Emergency Management Conference (ANZDMC), where Jean and I will present our research into the uses of Twitter in the Christchurch earthquake later today. We begin with a keynote from Assistant Commissioner Peter Martin from the Queensland Police Service, though, who was District Disaster Coordinator for the Brisbane-based response to the 2011 floods.

From late November 2010, Queensland experienced some very heavy rain, and many rivers across the state reached record flood levels, this was worsened by Cyclone Tasha in north Queensland by the end …

Canberra.
And the (dubious) honour of presenting the final paper in the final session at DHA 2012 falls to … me. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add audio to this as soon as I can, too I've now finally also managed to add the audio, no thanks to a very dysfunctional Slideshare.

Canberra.
We’ve reached the last session of Digital Humanities Australasia 2012, and it’s the one I’m in as well. But we start with Mark Coté, whose interest is especially in smart phones. He begins by asking whether long-term humanists may sometimes feel as overrun by the digital humanities as inner-city dwellers may now feel by smart phone-wielding users.

Nonetheless, the digital humanities are an exciting development, and there’s now a need for some conceptual inquiries into the digital humanities. One area for this is the relationship between the human and technology, which must question the nature of the human …

Canberra.
The final speakers in this DHA 2012 session are Monica Omodei and Gordon Mohr. Monica, from the National Library of Australia, begins by pointing out the importance of Internet content as raw data for humanities research – and even when the live Web is the object of study, its ephemeral nature means that archives of Web content are absolutely crucial for verifiability and reproducibility.

Relevant examples of such research include social network research, lexicography, linguistics, network science, and political science, amongst many others. Common collection strategies to develop archives of online content include thematical and topical archiving, resource-specific archiving …

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA 2012 is Anna Gerber, whose interest is in open annotation for electronic editions. She defines annotations as additional information attached to a digital resource or part of the resource, which do not modify the original content of the resource itself.

Such annotations traditionally exist as footnotes, endnotes, glossary entries, or in other forms, providing descriptions, explanations, or justifications for particular textual or formatting choices (especially in critical editions); they may also be used to link in secondary material. But such annotations – especially in digital editions – can also be used for comments, questions …

Canberra.
We’ve entered the final afternoon of the Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 conference, and the next session I’m attending starts with Danny Kingsley, whose interest is in the changing nature of scholarly communication. Such communication generally follows a cycle from publication to reading to ideas to research to new publications, but there is no generic scholarly researcher: there is also an invisible college of people who share an interest in a topic, but may not be immediately connected to the research.

Scholarly communication ranges from ‘urban’ science models (lots of researchers, fast-moving, high volume and speed of publications, especially through …