Reginald Mitchell's List: Digital Citizenship - Boston Marathon Bombing of 2013

• IT WAS an unprecedented display of vigilantism. After the bombings at the Boston marathon last week, thousands of would-be sleuths flocked to the internet. They scoured pictures and video and posted images of suspicious characters with backpacks, who seemed to fit official descriptions of the most wanted.
• But they failed badly: members of the social media site Reddit falsely accused a missing college student, Sunil Tripathi, of the crimes. Law enforcement agencies got the real suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in a very old-fashioned way. An all-out manhunt ended on 19 April when a resident in Watertown, Massachusetts, discovered Tsarnaev hiding in a boat.
• As an example, Meier points to a recent study of misinformation on Twitter after the 2010 Chilean earthquake. Carlos Castillo of the QCRI and colleagues showed that non-credible tweets tend to spark responses that question or rebuke them -- a trait software can be trained to recognise. "Non-credible information propagates across the twittersphere leaving very specific ripples behind," says Meier. "You could absolutely start having a probability -- a percentage chance that particular tweets are not credible."
• Such principles become even more important in a real manhunt, he says. In the hours after the stand-off between police officers and Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan, messages requesting information could have been sent out to all Twitter and Facebook accounts that fell within the area where Dzhokhar was believed to be hiding. The targeting could even have been further refined by sending tweets only to active users, those with a good record of accurate tweeting, or older established accounts.

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• USERS OF CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY and social media reacted quickly after explosions ripped through crowds near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last week, sending out updates and snapping photos and recording videos that officials said would be "critical" pieces of evidence in their investigation into the bombings.
• Early in the investigation, police stressed that photos and videos would be crucial to solving the crime. "It's our intent to go through every frame of every video we have," said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis a day after the bombing.

• Investigators were so eager to get smartphone images related to the bombing that Massachusetts State Police detectives were asking passengers checking in for flights at Boston's Logan International Airport if they had pertinent videos or photos.
• Meanwhile, Twitter users near the marathon finish line started tweeting as soon as the bombs exploded, and their actions illustrated both the upside and the downside of the use of social media in emergencies.
• For instance, Twitter was a useful communications tool for public authorities like the Boston police and marathon organizers, but many people also used it to spread reports that were questionable or just plain inaccurate.
• Social media "cuts both ways," noted Greg Sterling, an analyst at Opus Research. "It allows you to get the information out more quickly, but it can also fan hysteria."
• The Boston Police Department's Twitter log showed the positive side of social media. It was updated minute by minute in the aftermath of the bombings, often with instructions to avoid certain areas, or with information about where police officers might be stationed. It was also a source of information on Friday as police warned residents in Boston and surrounding communities to stay indoors as the suspects were sought.

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• Three days later, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon found herself talking about Boston's ordeal with a group of graduate students at Northeastern University, where she is a professor of English. She is also a co-director of the university's NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, a recently created center for digital humanities and computational social science.
• The answer, Ms. Dillon decided then, was to find a way for anyone to share his or her story. She and her colleagues at the NULab created Our Marathon, an online community archive, and invited members of the public to contribute first-person accounts, photographs, and videos describing how the bombing had affected them. "No story is too small for Our Marathon," the site says, in what could be a mantra.
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  he Boston effort is the latest in a series of digital community archives that have sprung up in the immediate wake of traumatic events. Prominent examples include the September 11 Digital Archive, devoted to the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, created after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in 2005.

• The organizers also hope that Our Marathon will serve as a resource for researchers, filling in gaps left by news-media coverage. During and after the April 15 bombing, TV and newspaper reports focused on the big stories: the suspects, the dead and injured, the responders.
• The site had collected more than 3,300 items as of last week: photos and first-person accounts from the finish line; images of stuffed animals and messages left at a makeshift memorial in Copley Square; notes from schoolchildren thanking first responders and medical personnel. There are screenshots of Facebook pages and photos of Boston Red Sox fans carrying the "Boston Strong" signs in the weeks after the event. There are images and memes shared on social media--"Boston Strong" icons posted on Facebook and Twitter, for instance.
• Digital collecting moves quickly; so, too, does technical obsolescence. The field has come a long way in a decade, Ms. Leon says, which should help newer efforts like Our Marathon. Such projects are "so much easier to do now than they used to be," she says.

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• One of the most consistent reports to come out of Boston in the aftermath of the terrorist bombings in the crowds of spectators during the Boston Marathon is that their cell phones wouldn't work. Immediately a few reporters in the media speculated that the authorities had ordered the cell phone networks to be shut down, perhaps to prevent further bombs from going off. But it wasn't true.
• True or not, these rumors continued to circulate as the reporters for the television networks said that this might be happening. Their speculation was supported by a story that appeared on the Associated Press newswire saying that such a shutdown did, in fact, take place. Reports of government action remained rampant after this, despite the fact that the AP quickly retracted the story.
• In fact, while there were cell phone outages in Boston in the minutes after the bombings, this wasn't the result of some government agency action, such as the time when managers of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco pulled the plug on cell phone service within its system in an attempt to quell protests.
• Mobile phones went out in Boston for two reasons. The first was that everybody anywhere near Boston who knew someone who might conceivably be near the bombing site called to make sure that person was OK. Meanwhile, those people not calling their friends or relatives were trying to send out photos or videos of the event. The cell phone network gets overloaded in situations like that, and this happened in Boston.
• The other thing that happened is that law enforcement and other first responders have a priority code that lets them get access to the cell network even if it means blocking another caller. First responders depend heavily on the wireless networks for emergency communications, which is another reason they didn't order the networks shut down.
• And in fact, the cell phone outage in Boston was much less severe than it has been in other emergencies. The reason? Cell companies had already added a huge amount of capacity in the area of the Boston Marathon and in other areas along the route of the race, and as a result the overload was brief. Sprint Nextel, a favorite service of first responders, explained it to eWEEK in an email from spokesperson Crystal Davis.

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