Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the Houston Police Department (HPD)’s public engagement efforts using Twitter during Hurricane Harvey, which was a large-scale urban crisis event. Design/methodology/approach: This study harvested a corpus of over 13,000 tweets using Twitter’s streaming API, across three phases of the Hurricane Harvey event: preparedness, response and recovery. Both text and social network analysis (SNA) techniques were employed including word clouds, n-gram analysis and eigenvector centrality to analyze data. Findings: Findings indicate that departmental tweets coalesced around topics of protocol, reassurance and community resilience. Twitter accounts of governmental agencies, such as regional police departments, local fire departments, municipal offices, and the personal accounts of city’s police and fire chiefs were the most influential actors during the period under review, and Twitter was leveraged as de facto a 9-1-1 dispatch. Practical implications: Emergency management agencies should consider adopting a three-phase strategy to improve communication and narrowcast specific types of information corresponding to relevant periods of a crisis episode. Originality/value: Previous studies on police agencies and social media have largely overlooked discrete periods, or phases, in crisis events. To address this gap, the current study leveraged text and SNA to investigate Twitter communications between HPD and the public. This analysis advances understanding of information flows on law enforcement social media networks during crisis and emergency events.

We analyzed topical scopes of two digital and two data curation curricula offered as (post)graduate certificates or specializations. We investigated a question of what the topical similarities and differences are between the curricula. To address this question: first, we identified topics from individual course and curriculum descriptions; second, we compared the topics from curriculum descriptions with each other; and third, we compared the topics from course descriptions that are part of a curriculum. We found several topics which were acting as least common denominators between two digital curation and between two data curation curricula. Such topics illustrated the fundamental components within the same type of curricula. The two common topics among all curricula were ‘standards’ and ‘management.’ This may indicate the importance of following the standards in preparation of digital (data) objects and in curatorial processes, as well as the importance of continued management of such resources in a repository. Our approach may be applicable to other types of educational opportunities such as workshops, MOOCs, and webinars. As we analyze more curation curricula, we may be able to develop a more accurate and comprehensive topical framework for the domain of digital and data curation, further enhancing the education for future digital and data curators.