Achieving Accuracy through Ambiguity: the Interactivity of Risk Communication in Severe Weather Events
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Achieving Accuracy through Ambiguity: the Interactivity of Risk Communication in Severe Weather Events Melissa Bica1* , Joy Weinberg2 & Leysia Palen1,2 *1Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, 430 UCB, 1111 Engineering Dr, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA (Email: [email protected]); 2Department of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder, 1045 18th Street UCB 315, Boulder, CO, CO 80309, USA Abstract. Risks associated with natural hazards such as hurricanes are increasingly communicated on social media. For hurricane risk communication, visual information products—graphics—generated by meteorologists and scientists at weather agencies portray forecasts and atmospheric conditions and are offered to parsimoniously convey predictions of severe storms. This research considers risk interactivity by examining a particular hurricane graphic which has shown in previous research to have a distinctive diffusion signature: the ‘spaghetti plot’, which contains multiple discrete lines depicting a storm’s possible path. We first analyzed a large dataset of microblog interactions around spaghetti plots between members of the public and authoritative weather sources within the US during the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. We then conducted interviews with a sample of the weather authorities after preliminary findings sketched the role that experts have in such communications. Findings describe how people make sense of risk dialogically over graphics, and show the presence of a fundamental tension in risk communication between accuracy and ambiguity. The interactive effort combats the unintended declarative quality of the graphical risk representation through communicative acts that maintain a hazard’s inherent ambiguity until risk can be foreclosed. We consider theoretical and practice-based implications of the limits and potentials of graphical risk representations and of widely diffused scientific communication, and offer reasons we need CSCW attention paid to the larger enterprise of risk communication. Keywords: Forecasts, Hurricanes, Imagery, Risk communication, Risk interpretation, Scientific representations, Social media, Uncertainty, Weather
1. Introduction Risk communication of severe weather events is an area of practice that has relatively recently evolved from the enactment of a reductive transmissive model of communication (Shannon 1948; Shannon and Weaver 1963) to a model that builds upon the dialogic ways we come to understand the complex matter of uncertainty (Eosco 2008; Morss et al. 2017; Gui et al. 2018). This conceptual transformation that is informing industry practice came about independently from the rise of social media. However, exchanges over social media make it possible to examine why interactivity in risk
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communication is important through the questions, answers, and comments that people make in response to difficult-to-understand representations of risk. To this end, this research examines how risk communication happens over
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