Every week, we provide interesting links from around the web that discuss issues regarding the verification processes of content from social media. Here is our list for this week.

 

 

New paper out on real-time crisis mapping of natural disasters

REVEAL project partner ITInnovation has just published a paper in the highly acclaimed journal Intelligent Systems, IEEE (Volume: 29,  Issue: 2). In the paper, authors Stuart E. Middleton, Lee Middleton and Stefano Modafferi propose a social media crisis mapping platform for natural disasters using locations from gazetteer, street map, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) sources for areas at risk of disaster, and match these to geoparsed real-time tweet data streams. The authors use statistical analysis to generate real-time crisis maps. Geoparsing results are benchmarked against existing published work and evaluated across multilingual datasets. Two case studies compare five-day tweet crisis maps to official post-event impact assessment from the US National Geospatial Agency (NGA), compiled from verified satellite and aerial imagery sources. The work was carried out as part of the (now completed) FP7 TRIDEC project, and is being continued and built upon in REVEAL.

Link to paper: Real-Time Crisis Mapping of Natural Disasters Using Social Media

Here you can find a narrated video explaining the crisis mapping in action

 

Verification at DW’s Global Media Forum (GMF)

The topic of verification was also featured at DW’s Global Media Forum, hosted by Deutsche Welle in Bonn from 30 June until 2 July 2014. About 2,000 attendees met to discuss and debate under this year’s conference motto “From Information to Participation”. Sessions dealt, among others, with the situation in Ukraine, highlighting the importance of verification, but also the difficulties involved when it comes to assessing the credibility of sources and accuracy of content published in Social Networks. Other topics covered how one can protect sources, media developments in transitional countries, surveillance practices and much more.

Source (and full programme available on): DW Global Media Forum

 

Tool: Trooclick

A new tool that recently entered the verification scene is trooclick. It is a Firefox add-on and, according to the providers, “shows you the glitches in the story you’re reading. A glitch is an inconsistency, an inaccuracy or an error in the story.” Trooclick is currently in beta status. We’ll be keeping an eye on it!

Source: trooclick

 

Service / Tool: Truth Goggles

Another tool that is still in its experimental stages is Truth Goggles. From what we could figure out so far is it works as follows (largely manually): You paste an article or URL into the tool, then highlight invdividual sections to which you provide further information, then publish it under a dedicated new URL. The original article is then displayed with your added comments and highlights for possible further investigations, additional comments and the like. This is what the makers of the tool call “providing a credibility layer for the Internet”.

Source: Truth Goggles

 

A great resource – now accessible for all!

The BBC Academy / College of Journalism recently opened up its services to a worldwide audience – for free. While it had previously only been accessible to licence fee payers in the UK, or on a subscription basis, it is now available completely free of charge. Users can access a variety of resources, ranging from information regarding social media newsgathering to verification. Certainly a site to visit!

Source: BBC Academy and College of Journalism

 

Study on newsroom practices

And finally, here’s a study worth looking into: ING recently published its findings on how newsrooms and journalists deal with Social Media content, what impact it has on news, and the way it is integrated into the reporting. The conclusion, briefly put, is also reflected in the study’s title: “more crowd-checking, less fact-checking.”

Source: 2014 Study impact of Social Media on News: more crowd-checking, less fact-checking