Collection of my GIScience Work
Crawford & Finn (2014) delve into the challenges that arise from the use of social and mobile data, inspecting the ontological and epistemological limitations, alongside ethical challenges (primarily consent concerns) of using crowd-sourced/volunteered geographic information (VGI) in understanding natural disasters. When using VGI to inspect these humanitarian crises, temporal distortion on social media often creates an ‘emergency imaginary,’ which pigeonholes the definition of a disaster used in research to an event that’s is both bounded within space and time. This commonly used view of disasters has thus led to uncertainty in the value of Twitter in actually representing people’s experiences during a humanitarian crisis. The use of hashtags, direct messaging activity, and performative activism/empathy as a result only capture the unpredictable and short-term nature of these disasters, NOT the longterm developments after the event: coping mechanisms and recovery. Additionally, as our data-intensive world progresses and our digital footprint grows, there are also privacy concerns that arise when using VGI. A good example of the this ethical dilemma can be seen in crisis mapping, where although the intent of the cartographer is often positive and “for the greater good,” vulnerable populations who are mapped often don’t have autonomy over how their location data and personal information is used—resulting in a “forced consent” of data sharing. For researchers, I believe there an ethical obligation in relation to these uncertainties to disclose the imperfections of using these data (Longley, 2008). Failing to address these consent and ethical complications would breach trust between researchers and the public, and further the grey space of what makes VGI use viable/appropriate within spatial research.
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