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"We're losing our neighborhoods. We're losing our community": A comparative analysis of community discourse in online and offline public spheres

Casey Randazzo, Minkyung Kim, Melanie Kwestel, Marya L Doerfel, Tawfiq Ammari

TL;DR

This study addresses the gap in crisis informatics by examining long-term recovery discourse after Hurricane Ida, comparing online (Online Neighborhood Group) and offline (Town Hall Meetings) publics in a New York Metropolitan borough. It employs a convergent mixed-methods design, using topic modeling with LDA to identify 14 online topics and 18 offline topics, and Jaccard similarity to assess cross-platform overlap, with coherence-guided topic selection ($k=18$ for Town Hall, $k=14$ for ONG). The findings reveal substantial topic overlap across modalities, notably in social capital mobilization and local knowledge, while certain topics (e.g., COVID-19 and life-or-death discussions) diverge in emphasis. The study offers concrete design and policy recommendations to bridge online and offline civic discourse, such as digital town halls and synchronized streaming, to enhance participation and recovery governance in the aftermath of disasters.

Abstract

Recovering from crises, such as hurricanes or wildfires, is a complex process that can take weeks, months, or even decades to overcome. Crises have both acute (immediate) and chronic (long-term) effects on communities. Crisis informatics research often focuses on the immediate response phase of disasters, thereby overlooking the long-term recovery phase, which is critical for understanding the information needs of users undergoing challenges like climate gentrification and housing inequity. We fill this gap by investigating community discourse over eight months following Hurricane Ida in an online neighborhood Facebook group and Town Hall Meetings of a borough in the New York Metropolitan region. Using a mixed methods approach, we examined the use of social media to manage long-term disaster recovery. The findings revealed a significant overlap in topics, underscoring the interconnected nature of online and offline community discourse, and illuminated themes related to the long-term consequences of disasters. We conclude with recommendations aimed at helping designers and government leaders enhance participation across community forums and support recovery in the aftermath of disasters.

"We're losing our neighborhoods. We're losing our community": A comparative analysis of community discourse in online and offline public spheres

TL;DR

This study addresses the gap in crisis informatics by examining long-term recovery discourse after Hurricane Ida, comparing online (Online Neighborhood Group) and offline (Town Hall Meetings) publics in a New York Metropolitan borough. It employs a convergent mixed-methods design, using topic modeling with LDA to identify 14 online topics and 18 offline topics, and Jaccard similarity to assess cross-platform overlap, with coherence-guided topic selection ( for Town Hall, for ONG). The findings reveal substantial topic overlap across modalities, notably in social capital mobilization and local knowledge, while certain topics (e.g., COVID-19 and life-or-death discussions) diverge in emphasis. The study offers concrete design and policy recommendations to bridge online and offline civic discourse, such as digital town halls and synchronized streaming, to enhance participation and recovery governance in the aftermath of disasters.

Abstract

Recovering from crises, such as hurricanes or wildfires, is a complex process that can take weeks, months, or even decades to overcome. Crises have both acute (immediate) and chronic (long-term) effects on communities. Crisis informatics research often focuses on the immediate response phase of disasters, thereby overlooking the long-term recovery phase, which is critical for understanding the information needs of users undergoing challenges like climate gentrification and housing inequity. We fill this gap by investigating community discourse over eight months following Hurricane Ida in an online neighborhood Facebook group and Town Hall Meetings of a borough in the New York Metropolitan region. Using a mixed methods approach, we examined the use of social media to manage long-term disaster recovery. The findings revealed a significant overlap in topics, underscoring the interconnected nature of online and offline community discourse, and illuminated themes related to the long-term consequences of disasters. We conclude with recommendations aimed at helping designers and government leaders enhance participation across community forums and support recovery in the aftermath of disasters.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 42 sections, 4 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. PRIOR WORK
  3. Community Discourse During Crises
  4. Community organizing
  5. The effects of social media platform affordances on organizing possibilities
  6. Local neighborhood groups organizing to cope with COVID
  7. Public Sphere Theory
  8. Publics
  9. Notions of space
  10. Online and offline spaces
  11. The materiality of physical and digital publics
  12. Materiality
  13. Materiality of traditional physical publics
  14. Materiality of digital publics
  15. STUDY DESIGN
  16. ...and 27 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Study Design: after collecting data from both Town Hall Meetings and Online Neighborhood Group threads on Facebook, we used computational methods to describe the topics discussed in both. We then conducted thematic analysis to contextualize and thematically group the topics.
  • Figure 2: Coherence Scores of Topic Models. The left graph shows the coherence scores for Town Hall Meetings which peak at 18 topics. The right graph shows the coherence scores for the Online Neighborhood Group which peak at 14 topics.
  • Figure 3: Jaccard Coefficients
  • Figure 4: Heatmap of similarity between topics in the Town Hall Meetings and online neighborhood threads