"We conducted interviews with conflict journalists who covered the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq and who work for the major international news agencies and media companies. These journalists did most of their reporting from remote locations as the conflict zones were too dangerous to be
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physically present. We investigated how the journalist did their jobs with the communicative affordances of digital tools and how digital trust-building occurred. The trust-building process between journalists and sources shifted across platforms and according to the technologies’ communicative affordances. We established that reporters had embraced the flow of news material on social media platforms as a valuable source of information, but after exercising extreme caution. Journalists upheld the boundaries that separated them from amateurs by emphasizing their role in making sense of events. They also fortified their gatekeeping role through verifying and vetting information – a task needed to maintain credibility and protect readers and viewers from misinformation and propaganda. Encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp played a major role in speeding up communication with and protecting potential sources and verification." (Abstract)
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"Online media is a blessing and a curse for academic research on war. On the one hand, the internet provides unprecedented access to information from conflict zones. On the other hand, the prevalence of disinformation can make it difficult to use this information in a transparent way. This article p
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roposes digital forensic process tracing as a methodological innovation to tackle this challenge and make case study research on the causes of war fit for the social media age. It argues that two important features of process-tracing methodology – source criticism and Bayesian updating – are well developed in theory but are rarely applied to the study of armed conflict. Digital forensic process tracing applies these features to online media sources by drawing on the journalistic practice of open source intelligence (OSINT) analysis. This article uses the case of the war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology." (Abstract)
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"This report aims to introduce techniques and procedures of NLP (Natural Language Processing), the computational preparation and analysis of text data, to map the public voice and aid development. First, the report introduces essential concepts of communication and elaborates on the theoretical foun
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dations of natural language analyses. Second, the report reviews research on NLP of social media text data by showcasing studies that have applied the techniques to the Sustainable Development Goals. Third, the report reviews specific NLP techniques, including data preprocessing, and dicusses libraries and programming procedures. It also reviews concepts such as keyword extraction to identify relevant terms, topic modeling to detect common themes, and text classification to recognize language features. These NLP techniques are showcased in two case studies. The first shows how topic modeling can be applied to derive insights on the public debate over climate change in Australia. The second demonstrates how text classification can be leveraged to analyze public sentiment on COVID-19 in the Philippines. Finally, the report discusses the challenges and limitations, as well as the potentials, of NLP." (Foreword)
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"Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, looking in a broad-brush way at how the Internet and related technologies have changed journalism and media. It notes how audiences are fragmenting in an environment of excess information, and considers the boom in online advertising relative to mainstream me
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dia revenues. It also discusses the way that the Internet threatens traditional commercial media business models. All of the chapters that follow are more hands-on and specific. Chapter 2 shows how to use various parts of the Internet such as the UseNet and listservs to generate story ideas that are beyond the often PR-generated news agenda, and how to find experts to interview for those stories. Chapter 3 does the same with blogs and related new media such as moblogs and podcasts. Chapter 4 considers the issue of citizen or participatory journalism and discusses how this phenomenon, often called audience-generated content, relates to newsgathering and the future of journalism. Chapter 5 looks beyond the usual suspects such as Google and offers ways to use the Internet technologies to find background information for stories. Chapter 6 works from the premise that the multimedia reporter will need to adopt different information-gathering processes compared with the mono-media reporter, and shows how to do that. Chapter 7 looks at how to assess the quality and veracity of information we find on the Internet. Technologies give us access to a vast amount of data, but how reliable and accurate are those data? Chapter 8 shows how to develop a beat using the Internet. It offers strategies for developing an area of expertise. Chapter 9 reflects the generosity of journalists on the Internet. It introduces the vast array of resources that reporters have made available for their colleagues around the world. Chapter 10 considers the legal implications of gathering information online and reporting news on the web. Chapter 11 shows how to do deeper forms of journalism using the Excel spread sheet and drawing on the wide range of statistics available on the Internet." (Pages xi-xii)
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