Kate Starbird · University of Washington
Crowds, Crisis and Convergence: Unpacking "Crowdsourcing" in the Context of Disaster

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The potential of connected crowds to solve complex problems (that neither individuals nor computers can solve alone) has been the focus of considerable research in recent years across disciplines and certainly within the HCI field. Though there are several perspectives for approaching crowd work, "crowdsourcing" has become a popular, umbrella term for the phenomenon. In this talk, I'll work unpack the crowdsourcing term within the context of disaster. In our hyper-connected world, large-scale disaster events are acting as catalysts for mass "convergence" online, which functions both to generate massive volumes of information and to organize that information. Pulling from multiple studies of crowd work during crisis events, I'll describe how the crowd attempts to solve complex problems and address gaps in response efforts through digital volunteerism and other productive crowd work. I'll then use these empirical findings to demonstrate the diversity of crowd work and to expose what a focus on "crowdsourcing" obscures.

Kate Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. Dr. Starbird's research, which is situated within the fields of HCI and CSCW, examines interaction and collaboration as enabled, supported, and structured by social media and other online tools. She investigates both large-scale and small group online interaction within the context of crises and other mass disruption events, studying how digital volunteers and other members of the connected crowd work to filter and shape the information space. Dr. Starbird received her BS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1997 and her PhD in Technology, Media and Society from the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado in 2012.