Encountering Friction, Understanding Crises: How Do Digital Natives Make Sense of Crisis Maps?

2025-03-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the information comprehension challenges faced by digital-native youth when interpreting crisis maps, where public meaning-making mechanisms remain poorly understood. Using thematic analysis of online comments and semi-structured interviews with 18 German-speaking youth, the research integrates grounded theory coding with a learning sciences–human–data interaction framework. It identifies four meaning-making activities: *inspect*, *engage*, *place*, and a novel dimension—*personal responding*—capturing affective engagement. The study empirically uncovers four critical friction points: color misinterpretation, contextual absence, perceived detachment, and insufficient trust—extending human-centered explanatory frameworks for crisis mapping. Based on these findings, the authors propose a four-dimensional public meaning-making model, offering empirical foundations and design guidelines to enhance crisis maps’ comprehensibility, credibility, and empathic resonance.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Common-Sense Reasoning
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Explainable and interpretable methods for personalization

Abstract

Crisis maps are regarded as crucial tools in crisis communication, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change crises. However, there is limited understanding of how public audiences engage with these maps and extract essential information. Our study investigates the sensemaking of young, digitally native viewers as they interact with crisis maps. We integrate frameworks from the learning sciences and human-data interaction to explore sensemaking through two empirical studies: a thematic analysis of online comments from a New York Times series on graph comprehension, and interviews with 18 participants from German-speaking regions. Our analysis categorizes sensemaking activities into established clusters: inspecting, engaging with content, and placing, and introduces responding personally to capture the affective dimension. We identify friction points connected to these clusters, including struggles with color concepts, responses to missing context, lack of personal connection, and distrust, offering insights for improving crisis communication to public audiences.

Problem

• How digital natives interpret crisis maps during crises.
• Understanding public engagement with crisis communication tools.
• Identifying friction points in crisis map sensemaking processes.

Innovation

• Integrates learning sciences and human-data interaction
• Uses thematic analysis and participant interviews
• Identifies friction points in crisis map engagement