Group items tagged

8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users Craig Silverman by Craig Silverman Published Apr. 27, 2012 7:46 am Updated Apr. 27, 2012 9:23 am Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members. For example, lots of people talk about how Andy Carvin does crowdsourced verification and turns his Twitter feed into a real time newswire. Lost in the discussion is the fact that Carvin also develops sources and contacts on the ground and stays in touch with them on Skype and through other means. What you see on Twitter is only one part of the process. Some things never go out of style. At the same time, there are new tools, techniques and approaches every journalist should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, several leading practitioners of what I sometimes call the New Verification are gracious and generous about sharing what they know. One such generous lot are the folks at Storyful, a social media curation and verification operation that works with clients such as Reuters, ABC News, and The New York Times, among others. I wrote about them last year and examined how in some ways they act as an outsourced verification service for newsrooms. That was partly inspired by this post from Storyful founder Mark Little: I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we c

"ReConstitution 2012, a fun experiment by Sosolimited, processes transcripts from the presidential debates, and recreates them with animated words and charts. Part data visualization, part experimental typography, ReConstitution 2012 is a live web app linked to the US Presidential Debates. During and after the three debates, language used by the candidates generates a live graphical map of the events. Algorithms track the psychological states of Romney and Obama and compare them to past candidates. The app allows the user to get beyond the punditry and discover the hidden meaning in the words chosen by the candidates. As you let the transcript run, numbers followed by their units (like "18 months") flash on the screen, and trigger words for emotions like positivity, negativity, and rage are highlighted yellow, blue, and red, respectively. You can also see the classifications in graph form. There are a handful of less straightforward text classifications for truthy and suicidal, which are based on linguistic studies, which in turn are based on word frequencies. These estimates are more fuzzy. So, as the creators suggest, it's best not to interpret the project as an analytical tool, and more of a fun way to look back at the debate, which it is. It's pretty fun to watch. Here's a short video from Sosolimited for more on how the application works: "