Crowd computation: organizing information during mass disruption events.

ABSTRACTThis research examines large-scale human interaction occurring through social media during times of mass disruption, seeking to understand how the connected crowd acts to organize a flood of data moving through those platforms into useful information resources. The work combines empirical analysis of social media communication, interviews, and participant observation to explore how people work to organize information and how they use social media platforms to organize themselves to do this work. Synthesizing findings from four distinct, yet interrelated studies, this research progresses towards a new conceptualization of the distributed, connected work of organizing information during mass disruption events.