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How do we use Facebook during emergencies?

UiA will be charting communication patterns and suggest good solutions for searching for and sharing information in social media during emergency situations.

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Tim A. Majchrzak, Sigurd Paulsen, Marte Krogstad, Jennifer Fromm, Petter Stranger and Kim Henrik Gronert, photo
Meeting for the RISE project at Kristiansand municipal council. From the left, Associate Professor Tim A. Majchrzak (UiA), Sigurd Paulsen (Kristiansand municipal council), Marte Krogstad (Kristiansand municipal council, Jennifer Fromm (University of Duisburg-Essen), Petter Stranger (Kristiansand municipal council) and Kim Henrik Gronert (Kristiansand municipal council).
Tim A. Majchrzak, profilbilde

Associate Professor Tim A. Majchrzak is the coordinator for the project at UiA.

"During events such as natural disasters or man-made disasters, social media communication has an increasingly larger role for citizens and emergency services," Associate Professor Tim A. Majchrzak from the Department of Information Systems at the University of Agder (UiA) says.

The research project "RISE: Social Media Analysis" is carried out from 2019 to 2022. Some of the most leading researchers within this area is meeting in this project to share knowledge and research the effect of social media, risk and possibilities. At UiA, the project is led by Majchrzak.

Will suggest new solutions

The project will attempt to chart communication patterns and suggest effective solutions for searching for and sharing information in risk situations. Large amounts of data are produced through social media during catastrophes.

Researchers from nine European, Australian, Latin American and Southeast Asian institutions participate. The research is coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). The research network will receive close to 1.2 million Euro from the EU during the project period.

Read more about the project here

Co-creation

Associate Professor Majchrzak hopes that the researchers can benefit from learning from each other.  

"At UiA, we have a lot of varied experience within information and communication technology and social media, but we tend to work a little too independent from each other and often do not know about each other's work," Majchrzak says.

Majchrzak, who has an education in software engineering, believes that bringing different researchers together will be very favourable for getting a better understanding of social media. 

Wants to involve more people

Majchrzak says that the project is open to new participants and that the teams are quite open. He is encouraging students and staff at UiA to contact him if they are interested in becoming involved in the project. A kick-off event will be held in mid-April in Germany. Smaller research groups will be created there to meet once a year to be followed up.