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SOCIOTEMPORAL DISORDER IN GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED DIGITAL HUMANITARIAN WORK by Wendy Norris B.A., University of South Florida, 2010 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Information Science 2020 Committee Members: Dr. Stephen Voida, University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Leysia Palen, University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Amy Voida, University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Brian Keegan, University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Katrina Petersen, Trilateral Research ii Norris, Wendy (Ph.D., Information Science) SOCIOTEMPORAL DISORDER IN GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED DIGITAL HUMANITARIAN WORK Thesis directed by Dr. Stephen Voida \What time is it?" is a deceptively simple question. Sociotemporality, or the social experience of time, is often taken for granted until there is a coordination breakdown. This dissertation ex- plores an especially acute breakdown in time: the high-tempo, time- and safety-critical work of digital humanitarians|teams of everyday people across the globe who curate social media and other online information for crisis responders on-the-ground during a mass emergency. Specif- ically, this work identifies and investigates a new concept of breakdown, coined sociotemporal disorder, across empirical, theoretical, and design constructs to understand how time is socially structured and experienced in humanitarian work; the temporal sensemaking strategies the team uses to discern information; and new ways to reveal breakdowns in time as a resource for the design of sociotechnical tools appropriated for this work. Together, this research contributes a roadmap to address a longstanding gap in the CSCW and HCI literature by interleaving the so- cial experience of temporality with instrumented time to mitigate against sociotemporal disor- der to allow distributed online work to productively unfold. This research, as a whole, foretells future work in exploring sociotemporal disorder as a resource in the design of sociotechnical sys- tems. iii Acknowledgements I am grateful beyond words to the following people who generously guided me through the doc- toral program and helped me blossom as a scholar and teacher. To my advisor Stephen Voida, a kind old soul whose brilliance is without peer. Thank you for your patience and friendship on this incredible journey. To my indefatigable co-advisor, Leysia Palen, who inspires me daily to follow my dreams and to embrace small comforts in flowers and dogs when the humanitarian work breaks my heart. I am equally indebted to my committee Amy Voida, Brian Keegan, and Katrina Petersen. Thank you so much for your willingness to lend support and advice when it mattered most. To Janghee Cho and Lucy Van Kleunen in the Too Much Information Lab and all the generous souls in the CU Boulder Information Science graduate cohort who prove daily that a caring cul- ture is a wellspring for the best scholarship. To my daughter, Drea Norris, whose thoughtfulness and resilience no know bounds. I am so in- credibly proud of you. To Howard and Terry Norris, my father and step-mother, who both passed away during my stud- ies. You instilled in me the value of hard work, a love of reading, and the importance of staying grounded. Rest in power. I miss you both very much. In closing, I dedicate this thesis to my digital humanitarian colleagues at The Standby Task Force| Valeria, Joyce, Leisa, Deepshikha, Stuart, Per, Liz, and the thousands of SBTF volunteers from 106 countries. It has been my supreme honor to join together with all of you to help ease suffer- ing in the world. iv Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Background . 3 1.1.1 Information and Communication Technologies . 3 1.1.2 Humanitarian Crisis and ICTs . 4 1.1.3 Crisis Informatics and ICTs . 4 1.1.4 Digital Humanitarians . 5 1.1.5 The Standby Task Force . 6 1.2 Research Questions . 7 1.3 Overview of the Research . 9 1.4 Style of this Dissertation . 14 1.4.1 Chapter 2: Is the time right now? . 14 1.4.2 Chapter 3: How to make sense of time? . 15 1.4.3 Chapter 4: Designing for sociotemporal disorder . 16 1.4.4 Chapter 5: Discussion . 16 1.4.5 Chapter 6: Conclusion and Future Work . 16 2 Is the Time Right Now? Reconciling Sociotemporal Disorder in Distributed Team Work 17 2.1 An Unprecedented Disaster . 17 v 2.2 Overview and Contributions of this Research . 19 2.3 Temporality and Work . 20 2.4 Digital Humanitarians . 24 2.5 Methods . 26 2.5.1 Research Context . 26 2.5.2 Corpus . 30 2.5.3 Data Analysis . 30 2.6 Pluritemporal Analytic Framework . 33 2.6.1 Three Temporal Orders . 44 2.6.2 Temporal Coordination: The Work of Reconciling Sociotemporal Disorder . 49 2.7 Discussion: Designing to Support Temporal Coordination Work . 51 2.8 Conclusion . 57 3 Narrating Time as Temporal Sensemaking 59 3.1 Introduction . 59 3.2 Background: Digital humanitarian work . 60 3.2.1 Case: 2017 Hurricane Maria . 61 3.3 Related Work . 62 3.3.1 Social Constructions of Time . 62 3.3.2 Temporal & Distributed Coordination . 62 3.3.3 Temporal Sensemaking . 63 3.3.4 Temporal Narrative . 63 3.4 Methods . 64 3.4.1 Participants & Recruitment . 65 3.4.2 Data Collection . 65 3.4.3 Data Analysis . 66 3.5 FINDINGS . 66 vi 3.5.1 Triaging Temporal Information . 67 3.5.2 Evaluating Temporal Information . 69 3.5.3 Negotiating Breakdowns in Temporal Information . 70 3.5.4 Synchronizing Temporal Information . 72 3.5.5 Crafting the Emergent Temporal Narrative . 74 3.6 Speculations on new temporal sensemaking approaches . 75 3.6.1 Triage Tools to Scale Good Will . 76 3.6.2 Visual Representations of Time & Evaluative Metadata . 77 3.6.3 Negotiate Clustered Information Rather than One-offs . 77 3.6.4 Synchronization Across the Team through Feedback . 78 3.7 Discussion and Implications . 79 3.8 Conclusion and Future Work . 80 4 Designing for Sociotemporal Disorder 82 4.1 Introduction . 82 4.2 Digital humanitarians as a community of practice . 84 4.3 Applying participatory design to sociotemporal disorder . 86 4.4 Methods . 87 4.4.1 Overview of the virtual PD approach . 87 4.4.2 Participants and recruitment . 88 4.4.3 A novel adaption of participatory design for virtual teams . 89 4.4.4 Temporal priming of workshop teams . 91 4.4.5 Data corpus . 92 4.4.6 Data analysis . 93 4.5 Findings . 93 4.5.1 Roadblocks to distributed temporal work . 93 4.5.2 Roadblock analysis . 94 vii 4.5.3 Determining design priorities . 97 4.5.4 Solutions analysis . 100 4.6 Discussion . 104 4.6.1 Themes across artifacts . 105 4.7 Design Implications and Future Work . 107 4.8 Conclusion . 108 5 Designing for Sociotemporal Disorder 110 5.0.1 New interpretations of speculative designs . 113 Bibliography 115 Appendix A SBTF vPD workshop protocol 126 viii Tables Table 4.1 Study participants by SBTF organizational role and team size . 90 4.2 Activity protocol for each vPD workshop. 109 A.1 Activities and Scripts . 126 ix Figures Figure 1.1 Overarching research . 10 1.2 ................................................ 11 1.3 ................................................ 12 1.4 ................................................ 13 2.1 Hurricane Maria crisis map . 27 2.2 Examples of crisis tweets . 29 2.3 SBTF Google Sheet for crisis data collection . 29 2.4 SBTF Slack thread . 31 2.5 Facebook post representing time as an interval . 35 2.6 Tweet representing time as chronology . 37 2.7 Example of conflicting data on SBTF Google Sheet . 44 2.8 Facebook post representing time as implicit . 46 2.9 Tweets representing locational timezone metadata . 46 2.10 Qualitative representation of time . 48 4.2 Roadblocks affinity map . ..