Composing with/for Community: Curating OA Disaster Literacy Materials

Sweta Baniya

Dr. Michael Salvo

605 Computers and Writing

03/21/2019

Composing with/for Community: Curating OA Disaster Literacy Materials

For the midterm for the 605 class, I am thinking about brainstorming on, how to “compose with the community” for increasing disaster literacy, especially in pre and post-disaster situations. Although there are a lot of resources that are on the websites of larger non-profit organizations, most of them may be not accessible to the community or grassroots level community organizations in countries like Nepal. Additionally, I have been thinking how a lot of the works that have been written on a disaster, especially the scholarly works are inaccessible during the disaster. I have been thinking: What are the best possible ways to curate easily accessible open access knowledge for disaster literacy? In this blog post, I want to think, write, and brainstorm on how we can mobilize open access sources to compose with the community and to curate and circulate disaster literacy knowledge.

Since this is a blog post, I want to refer back to the brainstorming we did during the class (Fig 1). From the brainstorming, I have been thinking of the following things for composing with and for community:

 

Brainstorming during the class

Implementing Service Learning / Community Engagement

I think one of the ways to make people think and learn more about disaster would be to introduce it academically and by implementing service-learning / community engagement in the writing classroom. This would allow the students to write and create materials for the communities that they might be part of and communities that they might not be part of. The students in a business writing class could create an open access repository for the people. Engaging students to think about how to create accessible materials for the community to implement during the disaster is really important and necessary. Having a course that is directed towards open access and disaster risk management might be really helpful.

·      Empowering Communities with Risk Mapping OA resources

As a scholar who wants to work with the community and wants to work for the community, I think it is important to empower the community with open accessed risk mapping resources. Scholars like Daniel Richards have conducted study on how to implement UX design in empowering communities with risk mapping tools (Richards, 2017). Richards presents a mixed methods study of how to take into consideration the visualization as well as ux while designing risk mapping tools.

·      Creating multidisciplinary Networks for Disaster Literacy

The other thing that I really want to brainstorm and think about is how to establish multidisciplinary networks for disaster literacy. Although, there have been a lot of works arguing that we need a multidisciplinary network to handle disaster. I have been thinking how these networks could be created beforehand such that in the case of disaster, we the networks could be mobilized.

Below are some of the authors that I am reading at the moment. Some of them are OA and some are not. I am still finding sources that will help me think of the research. However, since I want to focus my major research on writing on Social Network Analysis, I will focus mostly on it. 

Reference:

Alipour et al. - 2015 - Social Capital in Post Disaster Recovery.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://hdq.uswr.ac.ir/article-1-80-en.pdf

Kim et al. - 2017 - The Effect of Social Capital on Community Co-produ.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://ac-els-cdn-com.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/S1877705817317587/1-s2.0-S1877705817317587-main.pdf?_tid=9d11e89d-f5b7-42ec-9034-0fe4cb5f0c04&acdnat=1546186371_ea1853b86e8b9cdecc959aa707e486b1

Pigg - 2014 - Coordinating Constant Invention Social Media’s Ro.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/10572252.2013.796545?needAccess=true

Potts, L. (2013). Social Media in Disaster Response : How Experience Architects Can Build for Participation. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203366905

Potts, L., & Jones, D. (2011). Contextualizing Experiences: Tracing the Relationships Between People and Technologies in the Social Web. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 25(3), 338–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651911400839

Potts, L., Seitzinger, J., Jones, D., & Harrison, A. (2011). Tweeting disaster: hashtag constructions and collisions (pp. 235–240). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2038476.2038522

Press, T. M. (n.d.). Documenting Aftermath. Retrieved January 7, 2019, from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/documenting-aftermath

Richards, D. P. (2017). The challenges of exploring local place as a context of use in the study of interactive risk visualizations: experience report. In Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication  - SIGDOC ’17 (pp. 1–7). Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121208

Schneider and Hwang - 2014 - The Sichuan Earthquake and the Heavenly Mandate l.pdf. (n.d.).

Tim et al. - 2017 - Digitally enabled disaster response the emergence.pdf. (n.d.).