Waterproofing Data Project: Flood Memory Interviews, Transcript Data, 2018-2021

  The Waterproofing Data project explored how to build communities’ resilience to flooding, by engaging them in the process of generating the data used to predict when floods will occur. The project team developed a functional citizen-science mobile app prototype and a model school curriculum, which has been successfully co-produced and trialled with more than 300 students from over 20 schools and civil protection agencies of five Brazilian states (Acre, Mato Grosso, Pernambuco, Santa Catarina and Sao Paulo). The app and curriculum enabled the communities involved to democratise flood data, raise awareness of flood risks, and co-design new initiatives to reduce disaster risks to communities. The project invited participants to share their memories about past flooding events, the impacts they caused in their communities and their overall perception of risks. Participants were already engaged through participatory action research workshops held across the project. The researchers audio-recorded the interviews and then generated the transcripts; participant names were pseudonymised for the deposit, and the records were safely deleted. The only names that appear on the transcripts are those of the researcher who conducted the interview. This collection aims to provide future researchers with a sense of the perceptions shared across our project and potential future analysis. All documents are written in Portuguese.

Waterproofing Data investigates the governance of water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of data practices. Typically, data flows up from local levels to scientific "centres of expertise", and then flood-related alerts and interventions flow back down through local governments and into communities. Rethinking how flood-related data is produced, and how it flows, can help build sustainable, flood resilient communities. To this end, this project develops three innovative methods around data practices, across different sites and scales: 1) we will make visible existing flows of flood-related data through tracing data; 2) generate new types of data at the local level by engaging citizens through the creation of multi-modal interfaces, which sense, collect and communicate flood data, and; 3) integrate citizen-generated data with other data using geo-computational techniques. These methodological interventions will transform how flood-related data is produced and flows, creating new governance arrangements between citizens, governments and flood experts and, ultimately, increased community resilience related to floods in vulnerable communities of Sao Paulo and Acre, Brazil. The project will be conducted by a highly skilled international team of researchers with multiple disciplinary backgrounds from Brazil, Germany and the UK, in close partnership with researchers, stakeholders and publics of a multi-site case study on flood risk management in Brazil. Furthermore, the methods and results of this case study will be the basis for a transcultural dialogue with government organisations and local administration involved in flood risk management in Germany and the United Kingdom.