Crisis mapping is taken to a whole other level when you are incorporating visual communications and 3D technology in analyzing the data from a visual perspective. Crisis mapping within crisis communications has been around for several years and it is becoming a very useful tool in analyzing what is happening, timeline of events based on time and location, where it is happening, and explaining the relationships between the data points presented with the inclusion of geolocation information. This has been done in various crisis situations, including what recently happened earlier this year in Libya and the earthquake in New Zealand. There have been other crisis mapping sites and projects as well, and a list of some of these that happened this year are located here along with their URL to their site. Here is an video explaining the analysis process of collecting this data with GeoTime:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSmitI5z4N4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Firevolution.net%2F2011%2F06%2F01%2Flibya-crisis-map-data-3d%2F&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
What is exciting about this new form of technology and specialization within crisis communications is the range of possibilities when it comes in analyzing the data. Dr. Patrick Meier (Founder of Ushandi) explains in this blog post about these latest advancements with building a visual DNA for crisis mapping. With this new software, professionals can explore how some of these incidents and events are categorized differently based on their size and shape – which gives researchers an opportunity to explore from a visual perspective how this can impact a crisis communication message strategy and create more awareness about evolving situations from a real-time, visual, and geolocation perspective.
There are several questions that arise here. Does specific crisis events have a certain visual DNA structure? If we know this particular structure, will there be certain strategies – or chromosomes – that will be effective in reducing the severity of the crisis? How will crisis communication professionals train themselves in terms of analyzing this data from this perspective? These are just some of the questions I have with this latest development we are seeing with crisis mapping. I would be interested in hearing how mobile devices and tablets have also played with this form of technology and how these have been used. That would be very interesting to see if crisis mapping can be effective if translated into an application form that is connected not only with information, but with social networks. In addition, I would be interested in hearing how this new form of technology within the emerging media and social media is perceived in terms of being trustworthy and authentic. I think that there are certainly many possibilities here with future research studies in this area to explores some of these questions.
This is very exciting to see and explore the possibilities in this area – but we also have to acknowledge that we may need to have a crisis communications team that is multidisciplinary and make sure we have a specialist in science to help explore the similarities and differences in this emerging specialization within crisis communications – which seems to be DNA crisis mapping.
Hope you all are having a great day.
Best Wishes,
Karen
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