Natalie Harrower

Twitter journalism in Ireland: sourcing and trust in the age of social media*

ABSTRACT Twitter has been widely adopted into journalistic workflows, as it provides instant and widespread access to a plethora of content about breaking news events, while also serving to disseminate reporting on those events. The content on Twitter, however, poses several challenges for journalists, as it arrives unfiltered, full of noise, and at an alarming velocity. Building on the results of the first national survey of social media use in Irish newsrooms, this paper investigates the adoption of social media into journalistic workflows, journalists’ attitudes towards various aspects of social media, and the content and perspectives generated by these online communities. It particularly investigates how Twitter shapes the processes of sourcing and verification in newsrooms, and assesses how notions of trust factor into the adoption of the Twitter platform and content into these processes. The paper further analyses relationships between journalist profile and adopted practices and attitudes, and seeks to understand how Twitter operates in the current journalistic landscape. While this paper draws its data from a survey of journalists in Ireland, the analysis of the relationship between trust, sourcing, and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices may operate in the field of journalism as a whole.

Shaping our Legacy: Preserving the Social and Cultural Record

The shape of our social and cultural record is changing, but the value of preserving it for continued and long-term access is only increasing in urgency. Much of this record is now born-digital, an...

A semantic architecture for preserving and interpreting the information contained in Irish historical vital records

Irish Record Linkage 1864–1913 is a multi-disciplinary project that started in 2014 aiming to create a platform for analyzing events captured in historical birth, marriage, and death records by applying semantic technologies for annotating, storing, and inferring information from the data contained in those records. This enables researchers to, among other things, investigate to what extent maternal and infant mortality rates were underreported. We report on the semantic architecture, provide motivation for the adoption of RDF and Linked Data principles, and elaborate on the ontology construction process that was influenced by both the requirements of the digital archivists and historians. Concerns of digital archivists include the preservation of the archival record and following best practices in preservation, cataloguing, and data protection. The historians in this project wish to discover certain patterns in those vital records. An important aspect of the semantic architecture is the clear separation of concerns that reflects those distinct requirements—the transcription and archival authenticity of the register pages and the interpretation of the transcribed data—that led to the creation of two distinct ontologies and knowledge bases. The advantage of this clear separation is the transcription of register pages resulted in a reusable data set fit for other research purposes. These transcriptions were enriched with metadata according to best practices in archiving for ingestion in suitable long-term digital preservation platforms.

Sourcing and trust: Twitter journalism in Ireland

Social media, in particular Twitter, have been widely adopted in newsrooms for various purposes, including sourcing news leads and content, disseminating stories, soliciting user comments and driving traffic to corporate websites. This paper investigates the ways in which journalists use social media for sourcing and verification, and their attitudes towards social media in terms of trust. The analysis is built on a survey of journalists in Ireland conducted in 2013, which revealed that journalists in Ireland are heavy adopters of Twitter in their workflows, and in particular use social media for sourcing news leads and content. However, they are highly skeptical about the level of trust in social media. While this paper focuses on journalists in Ireland, the analysis of the relationship between trust, sourcing and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices operate in the new media landscape.

Introduction to Citizen Journalism and Social Media Minitrack

The exponential growth of social media as a central communication practice, and its agility in announcing breaking news events more rapidly than traditional media, has changed the journalistic landscape: social media has been adopted as a significant source by professional journalists, and conversely, citizens are able to use social media as a form of direct reportage. Social media content now forms a significant part of the digital content generated every day, and provides a platform for voices that would not reach the broader public through traditional journalistic media alone. Journalists and news organisations now monitor social media for breaking news and content, they use it to find sources and eyewitnesses, and to crowdsource varied perspectives on newsworthy events. They also use social media for promoting their content, attracting audiences, and driving traffic to their websites. The wealth of information social media provides is unprecedented in terms of velocity, if arguably not in terms of quality. In this emerging environment, citizen microblogs and other user-generated content constitute an important part of history and popular memory, in particular when attempting to capture significant events and the varied perspectives that accompany these events. This new landscape calls for technologies and methodologies to rapidly and efficiently capture, filter, verify and preserve content in a way that generates immediate value for journalistic purposes. A host of research questions arise around the role of social media in newsrooms and in the news production lifecycle [1], and particularly in the area of real time event and story detection from social sources, e.g. [3]. This minitrack is aimed at facilitating a conversation on these topics at HICSS-50, with a particular focus on the intersection of social media and journalism, as a subset of Computational and Data Journalism. In this minitrack we aim to address a variety of research questions from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. This year, in its second year, the minitrack presents a paper on a “Framework for Real-Time Event Detection using Multiple Social Media Sources” by Satya Katragadda, Ryan Benton and Vijay Raghavan. Extending the Event Detection at Onset (EDO) model, which detects an event within 3-8 minutes after the event is mentioned on Twitter [2], this paper presents a framework for social Event Detection, which uses Twitter and Tumblr as input. The detected events in this framework is validated using newswire data that is collected during a same time period. The results show that including multiple sources increases the number of detected events and also increase the quality of detected events. We would like to extend our appreciation to the authors who submitted to this minitrack, as well as the reviewers who dedicate their time to furthering the research of our contributors. We are looking forward to the continued growth and evolution of this emerging interdisciplinary and exciting field of research.

Introduction to Citizen Journalism and Social Media Archiving Minitrack

HICSS-48 marks the inaugural year for the Citizen Journalism and Social Media Archiving minitrack, and it comes at an opportune time, because the adoption of social media content as a journalistic source alongside the practice of citizen journalism, aided by the immediacy of social media as a publishing tool and the ubiquity of mobile communication devices, are reaching significant proportions. The Irish Social Journalism Survey (2014), for example, reveals that 99% of professional journalists in Ireland use social media in conducting their work, and comparable surveys from other countries reveal similarly high adoption rates. The exponential growth of social media as a central communication practice, and its agility in announcing breaking news events more rapidly than traditional media, has changed the journalistic landscape: social media has been adopted as a significant source by professional journalists, and conversely, citizens are able to use social media as a form of direct reportage. Social media content now forms a significant part of the digital content generated every day, and provides a platform for voices that would not reach the broader public through traditional journalistic media alone. In this emerging environment, citizen microblogs and other user-generated content constitute an important part of history and popular memory, in particular when attempting to capture significant events and the varied perspectives that accompany these events. Traditional journalism has well-developed archival practices, enabling the news production lifecycle to reuse and rediscover content. In contrast, the flow of citizen generated reporting through social media is ephemeral and disordered; it quickly becomes inaccessible if not captured and stored in some way. This new landscape calls for new technologies and methodologies to 1) rapidly and efficiently capture, filter and verify content in a way that generates immediate value for journalistic purposes; and 2) properly annotate and archive this information for longer-term preservation, access and reuse in the news life-cycle (e.g. for contextualisation, investigative reporting or comprehensive storytelling). A host of research questions arise around the role of social media in the news production lifecycle, and this minitrack is initiated to start the conversation at HICSS-48. Citizen Journalism and Social Media Archiving minitrack focuses on the areas of citizen/social journalism and social media archiving, which pose distinct, yet complementary, research challenges. By pairing these topics in one multidisciplinary minitrack we hope to stimulate an exchange of ideas between multiple domains of research and industry, including news media, digital archiving and preservation, social network analysis, semantic web and linked data, communication studies and cultural studies. This first year, we present three papers as follows: “Tracing Emergent Structure in Self-organized Citizen Journalism” by Daniel Nylen, draws on complexity theory to trace how participants in an online discussion board practice collective citizen journalism to establish facts about a local crime. “Trustworthy Citizen-generated Images and Video on Social Media Platforms” by Jessica Bushey takes an interdisciplinary approach to challenges associated with digital images, including trustworthiness, the importance of metadata, and procedures for proper archiving and preservation. “What just happened? A Framework for Social Event Detection and Contextualisation”, by Prashant Khare, Pablo Torres and Bahareh Heravi presents an event detection and contextualisation framework for social media content, specifically to assist journalists and news editors for breaking news detection and reporting. We would like to extend our appreciation to the authors who submitted to this minitrack, as well as the reviewers who dedicate their time to furthering the research of our contributors. We are looking forward to the continued growth and evolution of this emerging interdisciplinary and exciting field of research. 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Historical Data Preservation and Interpretation Pipeline for Irish Civil Registration Records

Semantic Web technologies give us the opportunity to understand today’s data-rich society and provide novel means to explore our past. Civil registration records such as birth, death, and marriage registers contain a vast amount of implicit information which can be revealed by structuring, linking and combining that information with other datasets and bodies of knowledge. In the Irish Record Linkage (IRL) Project 1864-1913, we have developed a data preservation and interpretation pipeline supported by a dedicated semantic architecture. This three-layered pipeline is designed to capture separate concerns from the perspective of multiple disciplines such as archival studies, history and data science. In this study, our aim is to demonstrate best practices in digital archives, while facilitating innovative new methodologies in historical research. The designed pipeline is executed with a dataset of 4090 registered Irish death entries from selected areas of south Dublin City.

How to Archive an Event: Reflections on the Social Repository of Ireland

Reflecting on a feasibility study into archiving social media, this article traces how “events” are defined in various domains and contexts, and employs case studies to analyze key relationships between hashtags and events to provide a critical analysis of how archival events can be constructed out of social events. It provides an overview of the archival and curatorial considerations involved in defining and preserving a social media event, and outlines the technologies developed for the process of collecting, annotating, and preserving social media events. Overall, the article endeavors to reveal how pragmatic considerations, computational approaches and curatorial perspectives shape digital archives and historical narratives. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/rinn.