Essay

The essay shall present and discuss selected theory, technology and tools related to the big data and emergency management, backed by scholarly and other references.

This autumn, we specifically invite essays that are preferably related to either big data, social media and emergency management.

Theme

Your mandatory essay is supposed to be "an individual, theoretical essay on chosen topic". In practice, it is you who propose a theme, and then I either accept it as is or guide you towards a more suitable theme.

I am open for essays that are not theoretical, but based on your own investigation and data collection, for example through interviews and/or archival analyses. But in any case, your essay should demonstrate "thoughtful research and discussion". It should be well backed by scholarly literature. More literature backing is needed if you have not done any investigation/data collection of your own beyond your literature search.

Finding a theme

It is a good idea to start thinking about possible essay themes already now. At least to get the processes started! Send me your ideas in an email, and I will provide early feedback. All I need is a few keywords or a sentence about one or more ideas your are considering. Later we can talk face to face.

Optional deadline: Thursday September 11th 1400. Submitting ideas is not mandatory at this stage.

• Here is an example of an initial idea on the keyword stage: "Ethics and Privacy in using social media for emergency management."
• A step further: "I want to look into interoperability of different freely available emergency data sources using big data technologies. What information is needed? who needed?"
• Here is an even more developed idea: "Something about how realistic it is to analyse lots of Twitter messages using sentiment analysers. Analysing messages takes computing resources, and there are so many Twitter messages posted after an emergency occurrance. I want to write something about the accuracy of the twitter data analysis."

Proposing a theme

Everyone who intends to take the course must send an essay proposal by email to vimala.nunavath@uia.no.

Deadline: Thursday October 3rd 1400

The proposal does not have to be long, but the following points must be made clear:

• Which problem or opportunity you are planning to address.
• Why this problem or opportunity is real.
• How you are going to investigate the problem or opportunity.
• Which relevant literature or other information sources you know already.
• How your are going to find more suitable literature.
• Whether you plan to collect your own data and, if so, from where and how.
• And, if so, how you are going to present and use them in your essay.
• How you plan to structure the essay (coarsely).
• Whether you plan to publish the essay on some kind of social media.

Length

Suggested length is 4000-6000 words. A theoretical essay should normally be a little longer than an essay based on own data collection. But effort quality is much more important than length. I encourage submitting the essay wholly or partially as one or several Wikipedia pages, or as clear extensions to existing pages.

Form

We encourage social media contributions. If you submit one or more social media contributions, you should also submit a short PDF document through the portal (see below - maybe just a title, a student number and a URI). You can also use the short document to list additional references or other stuff that did not fit as social media contributions, such as explaining your part of the contribution (which must be verifiable) if you have built on contributions by others.

You can also write a longer essay that includes one or more smaller social media contributions.

Essay submission

Hard deadline: Wednesday December 5th 1400

Essays are submitted through Inspera in PDF format. The file name and title page should clearly indicate who the group members are.

Evaluation criteria

These are the main evaluation criteria we will use:

• Clear, good and well-motived problem.
• Extent and coverage of your literature, in particular of the academic research literature.
• Depth of literature is more important than breadth.
• Originality, in particular of your independent/own contribution.
• How well argued and/or empirically backed the contribution is.
• Extent: how hard you have worked and how much you have done.
• Quality of presentation.
• Social media contributions will weigh positively.

Essay presentations

The session on Thursday November 8th will focus on essay presentations. 15-20 minutes and around 10 slides is an appropriate length.

Depending on the number of people who take the course, we may not have much time per essay. This includes: getting your slides up and running, presenting the actual essay, presenting critique, and posing/answering questions. In addition to presenting your own essay. you are supposed to offer comments to at least one other essay.

This means that you need to be really well prepared. A short presentation is much harder than a long one: "Lincoln [... w]hen asked to appear upon some important occasion and deliver a five-minute speech, he said that he had no time to prepare five-minute speeches, but that he could go and speak an hour at any time." (H. H. Markham, Governor of California, 1893)

Presentation outline

The presentation form is up to you, but you should probably touch most of these points:

• What is the problem you have addressed?
• Why is this problem important?
• Which existing area(s) of research and/or practice are you building on?
  • explain the ones we have not yet touched in the course!
  • spend some time on this: for the listeners it may be the most interesting part
• What is your independent/own contribution?
  • examples: how your field(s) has evolved over time; missing knowledge/research; own data collection, e.g., through interviews; comparing different approaches - in practice or theory; designing a new solution for something; suggesting a framework of how different contributions fit together and are different; ...
• What has been your strategy to make that contribution?
  • how did you convince the reader that your contribution was sound?
• Which academic research literature did you use (in addition to the curriculum in INFO310)?
  • show your literature list, but don't try to explain the papers :-)

Important: Upload your draft presentations to the portal in advance on Wednesday November 7th. Upload them to the SharedPresentations group (https://mitt.uib.no/groups/13857) in the folder EssayPresentations.

Essay oppositions

These are very brief and even more free form. You could address two or more of the issues below, or perhaps other ones. Do not try to address them all:

• Have you got reasons to think this problem unclear - if so how?
• Have you got reasons to think this problem is less relevant?
• Are there other areas of research and/or practice that are relevant here?
• Do you think the plan for an independent/own contribution are realistic? Is it the right type of contribution?
• Do you think this contribution is likely to be convincing? If no, which problems do you see?
• Have you got concrete ideas for finding more literature (but not just: maybe you can search in the library/on the internet...)?