Crisis communication and computational methods

Van der Meer and Kroon note that with the overload of information and the level of complexity of the communicative dynamics during crisis situations, computational methods can potentially provide the right means to explore new research areas and open certain black boxes within the field. Their chapter outlines some of the computational techniques that are currently available to give researchers a general overview of what type of research questions can be explored with these analyses. A specific subsection of the chapter addresses how computational methods can provide a helpful tool in crisis communication research to get a more detailed understanding of how misinformation is produced, spread, and affects communication flows. van der Meer and Kroon provide important methodological insights. van der Meer and Kroon's work pairs well with Chapter 4 by Vogler and Meissner that examines automated content analysis to address information overload.

Chapter 1 sets out the potential of computational methods for the field of crisis communication. More in particular, the chapter describes the most commonly applied automated techniques for analyzing communication phenomena and highlight how such techniques may help in understanding questions at the heart of crisis communication research. Finally, it is discussed how the field of computational communication science is evolving, and highlighted how some of the most advanced and recently developed techniques can be added to the toolkit of crisis communication scholars.