Manual or Machine? A Review of the Crisis and Disaster Literature

Abstract

This review aims to map the literature on crisis and disasters by means of a machine-read assessment of the scholarly debate in these domains. The software analyzed abstracts of over 1,000 articles of four related crisis and disaster journals—to find out how the software categorizes their content in a set of topics, what the dominant topics of discussion are, how the topics are distributed over the journals, and what profiles the journals de facto have. The review reflects on the advantages and the limits of machine-read classification and analysis vis-à-vis the manual approach. The conclusion offers an agenda for further research and debate.