On Tuesday, 8 April 2014, Eva Jaho of ATC and Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle represented the REVEAL project at the SNOW 2014 workshop, which took place in Seoul, South Korea. SNOW, short for Social News on the Web, took place in conjunction with the www2014 conference, which in turn is attended by about 2,000 people from all over the world. Attendees mostly come from the fields of computer and web sciences. So both the SNOW 2014 workshop and the www2014 conference are ideal events to showcase the research work carried out in REVEAL.

On Tuesday morning, Eva first took to the stage. Her presentation was entitled “Alethiometer: a framework for assessing trustworthiness and content validity in social media“. In her talk, she outlined what really matters when Social Media sources are being investigated. In particular, this centers around the “3 C’s”: contributor, content and context, according to the research carried out by Eva and her colleagues Efstratios Tzoannos, Aris Papadopoulos and Nikos Sarris.

Jochen’s talk was based on an accepted paper he wrote together with his DW colleague Nico Heise, entitled “News from the Crowd: Grassroots and Collaborative Journalism in the Digital Age“. As the title suggests, the focus was on outlining the concepts of and differences between grassroots and collaborative journalism. It concluded with the finding that one of the key challenges for and concerns of the journalistic profession when dealing with content from Social Media sources is verifying it – exactly what REVEAL is all about.

Both presentations resulted in a variety of questions and new contacts, so it was well worth the visit and effort. The papers can soon be accessed via our REVEAL publications section.

About the event:

SNOW 2014 is organised by one of REVEAL’s partner projects, Social Sensor. One of the workshop organizers, Symeon Papadopoulos from Greek research centre CERTH, is also an active REVEAL participant.

If you want to find out more about www2014, use the respective hashtag #www2014 or follow Jochen on Twitter (the conference ends on Friday, 11 April 2014).