Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

The Quartz guide to bad data

From the webpage:

An exhaustive reference to problems seen in real-world data along with suggestions on how to resolve them.

As a reporter your world is full of data. And those data are full of problems. This guide presents thorough descriptions and possible solutions to many of the kinds of problems that you will encounter when working with data.

Most of these problems can be solved. Some of them can’t be solved and that means you should not use the data. Others can’t be solved, but with precautions you can continue using the data. In order to allow for these ambiguities, this guide is organized by who is best equipped to solve the problem: you, your source, an expert, etc. In the description of each problem you may also find suggestions for what to do if that person can’t help you.

You can not possibly review every dataset you encounter with for all of these problems. If you try to do that you will never get anything published. However, by familiarizing yourself with the kinds of issues you are likely to encounter you will have a better chance of identifying an issue before it causes you to make a mistake.

If you have questions about this guide please email Chris. Good luck!

I hesitate at the word exhaustive for all but the most trivial of collections.

Saying “this is a guide to the most common bad data problems encountered by journalists” comes closer to the mark.

It makes a great checklist to develop your own habit of routine data checks that you apply to all data, even data from trusted sources. (Perhaps even more so from trusted sources.)

Enjoy!

Witness

From the about page:

WITNESS trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose human rights abuse and fight for human rights change.

The majority of the world’s population now has a camera in their pocket. People everywhere are turning to video to document and tell stories of abuse. But all too often, they are not filming safely or effectively, and their videos don’t make a difference.

We identify critical situations and teach those affected by them the basics of video production, safe and ethical filming techniques, and advocacy strategies.

A wealth of training materials and videos for anyone who wants to make a difference with their cellphone or video camera.

TV images of the police using water cannon and setting dogs on young people and children in Birmingham, Alabama, were a watershed event for the civil rights movement in the United States.

But that isn’t to promise the technique works every time. Scenes of far worse abuse are common from the Gaza strip and world governments continue to look away.

But you won’t know if the video advocacy will work for you or not unless you try. The Witness site will enable you to do just that.

Many of the techniques described are equally useful for journalists, researchers, etc.

I first saw this at FirstDraftNews as: The Witness Resource Library.

PS: Since I mentioned the Birmingham Children’s Crusade (1963), I should also point out that Malcolm X disagreed with the strategy of sending children into harm’s way. As do I. There are more appropriate ways to confront those of practice violence than sacrificing children for photo ops.

If you are not Donald Trump or some other form of a pathological liar, then you will enjoy: The First Draft Toolbox for newsgathering and verification by Alastair Reid.

From the post:

Welcome to the First Draft Toolbox, a list of tools and sites recommended by the First Draft Coalition to help in social newsgathering, verification and more.

We will be updating the page regularly with new tools as well as more detailed explainers and guides of those listed here already. If you have any suggestions of something we may have missed or are launching a tool you think should be featured here, please let us know by emailing our editor Alastair Reid.

You can also get email alerts for when we update the page using ChangeDetection or other available tools.

So many options can be overwhelming though, and putting them into practice can be daunting when just starting out. The best advice has always been to experiment with everything but find the tools that work for you, and keep up with thought leaders and case studies to see what the experts use and how they use them.
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By rough count I make it thirty-eight separate resources for newsgathering and verification. The big categories are: Social newsgathering and search tools, Location checking tools, Source verification, Image verification, YouTube Data Viewer and, Translation.

An impressive collection, several new to me and more than you will probably use at any one time. Try the most needed ones first and then branch out. Over time you will develop favorites and skill at using them.

The one omission that surprised me was Alastair failing to mention Snopes.com.

Snopes.com is one of the premier debunking sites on the WWW. For example:

Undercover Parcel Service No, UPS isn’t smuggling refugees into the United States in the dead of night.

Cetacean Harvestation No, cranberry farmers aren’t netting and canning dolphins during the harvest season.

Does that help explain Donald Trump’s standings in the polls?

Ask not only whether statements are “true,” but also what the speaker has to gain from giving them to you?

What Should the Media Do When Donald Trump Blatantly Lies? by Matthew Ingram.

From the post:

Political speech is a unique animal, especially during election season. It often mixes hyperbole with flowery language and aggressive rhetoric designed to inflame a particular passion. But Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is arguably in a category unto himself. More than almost any other 2016 candidate, he is prone to telling flat-out lies, making up facts, and distorting the truth to a prodigious extent.

This kind of behavior creates a tricky problem for the press. How should media companies deal with Trump and his falsehoods? If he were just a joke candidate without a hope of ever being the Republican nominee, it would be easy enough to ignore him. But he appears to stand a better than even chance of getting the nomination — he has been leading in the polls for months.

If media outlets attack Trump’s lying directly, they run the risk of being accused of bias by his supporters and Republicans in general. In fact, that kind of reaction is already occurring in response to a New York Times editorial that accused the billionaire businessman of playing fast and loose with the truth on a number of issues, including whether Muslims in New Jersey cheered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Part of the problem is that Trump and his candidacy are to some extent a creation of the mainstream media. At the very least, the two have developed a disturbingly co-dependent relationship.
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As disturbing as the article in on media coverage of lies by Donald Trump, the crux of the dilemma was put this way:

since the U.S. news media is based on the commercial model—and more eyeballs on the page or the screen is good for business—the networks love it when someone like Donald Trump says outrageous stuff. Fact-checking rains on the parade of that revenue model.

Perhaps news rooms need a new version of First they came for:

First Trump lied about the refugees, and I reported it—
Because I was not a refugee.

Donald Trump lied his way into the Whitehouse, and I made it possible-
Because fact checking conflicted with the bottom-line.

When I think about journalists who risk their lives reporting on drug cartels and violent governments, I wonder what they must think of the moral cowardice of political coverage in the United States?

In the realm of verification, context is king by Fergus Bell.

From the post:

By thinking about the wider context around shared UGC you can often avoid a lengthy forensic verification process where it isn’t required. For publishers looking at how they tackle competition with platforms – it is easy. Context is where you can make a distinction through strong editorial work and storytelling.
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Fergus has four quick tips that will help you fashion a context for user-generated content (UGC).

Content always has a context. If you don’t supply one, consumers will invent a context for your content. (They may anyway but you can at least take the first shot at it.)

It is interesting that user-generated content (UGC) isn’t held in high regard, yet news outlets parrot the latest rantings of elected officials and public figures as gospel.

When public statements are false, such as suggesting that Syrian refugees pose a danger of terrorism, why aren’t those statements simply ignored? Why mis-inform the public?

Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation by Craig Silverman.

From the executive summary:

News organizations are meant to play a critical role in the dissemination of quality, accurate information in society. This has become more challenging with the onslaught of hoaxes, misinformation, and other forms of inaccurate content that flow constantly over digital platforms.

Journalists today have an imperative—and an opportunity—to sift through the mass of content being created and shared in order to separate true from false, and to help the truth to spread.

Unfortunately, as this paper details, that isn’t the current reality of how news organizations cover unverified claims, online rumors, and viral content. Lies spread much farther than the truth, and news organizations play a powerful role in making this happen.

News websites dedicate far more time and resources to propagating questionable and often false claims than they do working to verify and/or debunk viral content and online rumors. Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement.

The above conclusions are the result of several months spent gathering and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data about how news organizations cover unverified claims and work to debunk false online information. This included interviews with journalists and other practitioners, a review of relevant scientific literature, and the analysis of over 1,500 news articles about more than 100 online rumors that circulated in the online press between August and December of 2014.

Many of the trends and findings detailed in the paper reflect poorly on how online media behave. Journalists have always sought out emerging (and often unverified) news. They have always followed-on the reports of other news organizations. But today the bar for what is worth giving attention seems to be much lower. There are also widely used practices in online news that are misleading and confusing to the public. These practices reflect short-term thinking that ultimately fails to deliver the full value of a piece of emerging news.
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Silverman writes a compelling account (at length, some 164 pages including endnotes) to prove:

News websites dedicate far more time and resources to propagating questionable and often false claims than they do working to verify and/or debunk viral content and online rumors. Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement.

We have all had the experience of watching news reports where we know the “facts” and see reporters making absurd claims about our domain of expertise. But their words may be reaching millions and you can only complain to your significant other.

I fully understand Silverman’s desire to make news reporting better, just as I labor to impress upon standards editors the difference between a reference (is used in the standard itself) and further reading (as listed in a bibliography). That distinction seems particularly difficult for some reason.

The reason I mention windmills in my title is because Silverman offers this rationale for improving verification by news outlets:

Another point of progress for journalists includes prioritizing verification and some kind of value-add to rumors and claims before engaging in propagation. This, in many cases, requires an investment of minutes rather than hours, and it helps push a story forward. The practice will lead to debunking false claims before they take hold in the collective consciousness. It will lead to fewer misinformed readers. It will surface new and important information faster. Most importantly, it will be journalism.

The benefits are:

1. Debunking false claims before they take hold in the collective consciousness
2. Fewer misinformed readers
3. Surface new and important information faster
4. It will be journalism

Starting from the top: Debunking false claims before they take hold in the collective consciousness.

How does “debunking false claims” impact traffic and social engagement? If my news outlet doesn’t have the attention grabbing headline about an image of Mary in a cheese sandwich, don’t I lose that traffic? Do you seriously think that debunking stories have the audience share of fantastic claim stories?

I suppose if the debunking involved “proving” that the image of Mary was due to witchcraft, that might drive traffic but straight up debunking seems unlikely to do so.

The second benefit was Fewer misinformed readers.

I’m at a loss to say how “fewer misinformed readers” is going to benefit the news outlet? The consequences of being misinformed accrue to the reader and not to the news outlet. I suspect the average attention span is short enough that news outlets could take the other side tomorrow without readers being overly disturbed. They would just be misinformed in a different direction.

The benefit of Surface new and important information faster comes in third.

I can see that argument but that presumes that news outlets want to report “new and important information” in the first place. What Silverman successfully argues is the practice is to report news that drives traffic and social engagement. Being “new and important has only a tangential relationship to traffic and engagement.

You probably remember during the wall-to-wall reporting about Katrina or the earthquakes in Haiti the members of the news media interviewing each other. That was nearly negative content. Even rumors and lies would be have been better.

The final advantage Silverman cites is It will be journalism.

As I said, I’m not unsympathetic to Silverman but when was journalism ever concerned with not reporting questionable and false claims? During the American Revolution perhaps?, The Civil War?, WWI?, WWWII?, Korea?, Vietnam?, and the list goes on.

There have been “good” journalists (depending upon your point of view) and “bad” journalists (again depending on your point of view). Yet, journalism, just like theology, has survived being populated in part by scalawags, charlatans, and rogues.

What journalism needs is pro-active readers to rebel against superficial, inaccurate and misleading reporting. Voting with their feet will be far more effective than exhortations to do better.

Investigative Reporters and Editors launches on-demand data journalism training site

From the post:

Want to become a data journalist? You’re going to need a lot of perseverance — as well as the right training.

To help make data journalism more accessible to all, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) recently launched NICAR-Learn, an online platform of training videos that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time.

“NICAR-Learn is a place for journalists to demonstrate their best tricks and strategies for working with data and for others to learn from some of the best data journalists in the business,” IRE wrote in a statement.

Unlike many online training platforms, NICAR-Learn’s content won’t consist of hour-long webinars. Instead, NICAR-Learn will produce a library of short videos, often less than 10 minutes long, to train journalists on specific topics or techniques relating to data journalism.

The first NICAR-Learn videos come from data journalist MaryJo Webster, who has produced four tutorials that draw from her popular “Excel Magic” course. Users can request specific tutorials by submitting their ideas to IRE.

These videos will be available at no charge to non-IRE members through the end of November. Beginning in December, IRE will add more videos to NICAR-Learn and place them behind a paywall.

To learn more, visit NICAR-Learn’s “Getting Started” page.

I can’t say that I like “paywalls,” which I prefer to call “privilegewalls.”

Privilegewalls because that is exactly what paywalls are meant to be. To create a feeling of privilege among those who have access, to separate them from those who don’t.

And beyond a feeling of privilege, privilegewalls are meant to advantage insiders over those unfortunate enough to be outsiders. Whether those advantages are real or in the imagination of members I leave for you to debate.

Personally I think helping anyone interested to become a better journalist or data journalist will benefit everyone. Journalists, member of the public who read their publications, perhaps even the profession itself.

Here’s an example of where being a better “data journalist” would make a significant difference:

So far as I know no journalist, despite several Republican and Democratic presidential candidate debates has every asked how they propose stop bank robberies in the United States?

In 2014 there were almost 4,000 of them at known locations, that is to say banks. If the government can’t stop robberies/attacks at known locations, how do they propose to stop terrorist attacks which can occur anywhere?

Just one fact, US bank robberies and a little creative thinking, would enable your journalists to pierce the foggy posturing on Paris and any future or past terror attacks.

The true answer is that you can’t. Not without monitoring everyone 24/7 as far as location, conversations, purchases, etc. But so far, no reporter has forced that admission from anyone. Curious don’t you think?

Bank Crime Statistics 2014.

JournalismCourses.org/

From the webpage:

Welcome to JournalismCourses.org, an online training platform of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.

Since 2003, our online courses have trained more than 50,000 people from 160 countries. Initially, the program was focused on online classes for small groups of journalists, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, but eventually the Knight Center began offering Massive Open Online Courses. It became the first program of MOOCs in the world specializing in journalism training, but it still offers courses to small groups as well. The MOOCs are free, but participants are asked to pay a small fee for a certificate of completion. Other courses are paid, but we keep the fees as low as possible in an effort to make the courses available to as many people as possible.

Our courses cover a variety of topics including investigative reporting, ethics, digital journalism techniques, election reporting, coverage of armed conflicts, computer-assisted reporting, and many others. Our MOOCs and courses for smaller groups last from four to six weeks. They are conducted completely online and taught by some of the most respected, experienced journalists and journalism trainers in the world. The courses take full advantage of multimedia. They feature video lectures, discussion forums, audio slideshows, self-paced quizzes, and other collaborative learning technologies. Our expert instructors provide a quality learning experience for journalists seeking to improve their skills, and citizens looking to become more engaged in journalism and democracy.

The courses offered on the JournalismCourses.org platform are asynchronous, so participants can log in on the days and times that are most convenient for them. Each course, however, is open just for a specific period of time and access to it is restrict to registered students.

The Knight Center has offered online courses in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Please check this site often, as we will soon announce more online courses.

For more information about the Knight Center’s Distance Learning program, please click here .

For more information about the Knight Center’s MOOCs and how they work, see our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) .
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JournalismCourses.org/ sponsors the Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization MOOC I just posted about but I thought it needed more than a passing mention in a post.

More courses are on the way!

Speaking of more courses, do yourself a favor and visit: Knight Center’s Distance Learning program. You won’t be disappointed, I promise.

Journalism Books

A collection of books on journalism, said to:

…inform & inspire the future of journalism.

Some twenty (20) books so it isn’t overwhelming like some of the cybersecurity sites that push current and out-dated material with equal enthusiasm.

Journalists find and report information that some people would prefer they didn’t.

That’s buys them a lot of street cred in my book.

Despite having relatives who are journalists I have read only some of these books. Makes a nice reading list for long winter nights! (Well, aside from XQuery archives and that sort of thing.) 😉

Tipsheets & Links from GIJC15

Program listing from the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference, annotated with tipsheets and links.

No response on my question on whether anyone is creating a subject index to tip sheets.

That’s unfortunate. The information trapped in some of these tip sheets merits wider dispersal and use, to say nothing of maintenance.

95 tools for investigative journalists from @Journalism2ls

95 Resources that cover:

• Alerts
• Analytics
• Collect Data
• Data Stories
• Interactive Video
• Location
• Map Stories
• Monitor News
• Multimedia
• People & Paper Trail
• Privacy
• Production
• Reporting
• Snowfalling
• Social Media
• Verification
• Wikipedia

I re-ordered the categories into alphabetical order. In the original post, both the categories and their contents appear in no order that is apparent to me. (If you see an ordering principle in the post, please give a shout.)

Impressive collection of tools!

Computation + Journalism Symposium 2015

From the webpage:

Data and computation drive our world, often without sufficient critical assessment or accountability. Journalism is adapting responsibly—finding and creating new kinds of stories that respond directly to our new societal condition. Join us for a two-day conference exploring the interface between journalism and computing.

Papers are up! Papers are up!

http://cj2015.brown.columbia.edu/papers.html

Many excellent papers but one caught my eye in particular:

DeScipher: A Text Simplification Tool for Science Journalism, Yea Seul Kim, Jessica Hullman and Eytan Adar.

High on my reading list after spending a day with “almost” explanations in technical documentation.

This could be very useful for anyone authoring useful technical documentation, not to mention writing for the general public.

Not only does the BBC News Lab have a cool logo:

They have an impressive list of projects as well:

BBC News Labs Project List

• News Switcher – News Switcher lets BBC journalists easily switch between the differents editions of the News website
• Pool of Video – BBC News Labs is looking into some new research questions based on AV curation.
• Suggestr – connecting the News industry with BBC tags – This prototype, by Outlandish.com for BBC News Labs, is about enabling local News organisations to tag with BBC News tags
• Linked data on the TV – LDPTV is a project for surfacing more News content via smart TVs
• #newsHACK – Industry Collaboration – #newsHACK is all about intense multi-discipline collaboration on Journalism innovation.
• BBC Rewind Collaboration – The News Labs team is working with BBC Rewind – a project liberating the BBC archive – to share tech and approaches.
• The News Slicer – The News Slicer takes MOS running orders and transcripts from BBC Broadcast Playout, then auto tags and auto segments the stories.
• News Rig – The future of multilingual workflow – A prototype workflow for reversioning content into multiple languages, and controlling an "on demand" multilingual news service.
• Atomised News – with BBC R&D – News Labs has been working with BBC R&D to explore a mobile-focussed, structured breadth & depth approach to News experiences
• Connected Studio – World Service – A programme of international innovation activities, aimed at harnessing localised industry talent to explore new opportunites.
• Language Technology – BBC News Labs started a stream of Language Technology projects in 2014, in order to scale our storytelling globally
• Blue Labs – BBC Blue Room and News Labs are working together to more efficiently demonstrate innovation opportunities with emerging consumer Tech.
• Immersive News – 360 Video & VR – We are looking into the craft and applications around 360 video filming and VR for Immersive News.
• The Journalist Toolbox – In June 2015, a hack team at #newsHACK created a concept called The Journalist Toolbox, proposing that newsroom content publishing & presentation tools needed to be more accessible for journalists.
• SUMMA – Scalable Understanding of Multilingual MediA – This Big Data project will leverage machines to do the heavy lifting in multilingual media monitoring.
• Window on the Newsroom – Window on the Newsroom is a prototype discovery interface to help Journalists look quickly across Newsroom system by story or metadata properties
• The Juicer – The Juicer takes news content, automatically semantically tags it, then provides a fully featured API to access this content and data.

This list is current as of 29 September 2015 so check with the project page for new and updated project information from the BBC.

The BBC is a British institution that merits admiration. Counting English, its content is available in twenty-eight (28) languages.

Alas, “breathless superlative American English,” a staple of the Fox network, is not one of them.