Tag: Mobile Phones
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Testing our first Prototypical Pictograph Dictionary in the Philippines
We developed a prototypical pictograph dictionary and grammar around heavy rain instigated hazard events; namely ‘floods’ and ‘landslides’. This dictionary was developed from the findings gathered and analyzed from the field study in March. Sahana’s Pictographs in disaster communication project is considering two disaster communication work flows; thus, downstream “alerting” and upstream “reporting”. In alerting,…
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Extending Early Warnings to Linguistically Marginalized Populations
In a work for the World Meteorological Organization, M. Golnaraghi [1] stated that “it is crucial that warning messages are clear, consistent and include risk information, designed with consideration for linking threat levels to emergency preparedness and response actions and understood by authorities and the population.” However, in its current state of practice, early warnings…
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Towards a Research Design: Pictographs in Disasters
The Research Team met at Microsoft Research India, in Bangalore, to formulate a practical and appropriate research design to test the hypothesis – “pictographs, designed for the linguistically challenged, can effectively communicate disaster information for saving lives and livelihoods.” In the context of disaster communication we have identified two key communication requirements, illustrated in the…
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Symbols in Alerting
Often people are misconstrued by alert messages and act inappropriately because they have not fully understood the message; especially, when they are short-text messages with partial information. There are many challenges with cognition, or understanding, of public warning messages. UNESCO estimates, on average, 30% of South/West Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans to be illiterate. Those countries…