Open data and co-production of public value of BBC Backstage

Openly accessible data sets (open data) have been recognized as valuable assets for creating business opportunities, revitalizing innovation and transparentizing organizational conducts. Public Service Broadcasters (PSB) such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have been motivated to experiment with open data and new forms of innovation in content making, delivery and audience engagement. Through a case study of the BBC Backstage project, this article examines how such open innovation processes of engaging the public in the reuse and remix of open data were conceived, supported, managed and maintained. The research found that BBC Backstage had played an important role in encouraging and motivating people to reuse and repurpose the open data released by the BBC. New forms of outputs have emerged, as seen in the Data Arts visualization project and the R&DTV clips mashups. The article argues that PSB public value can be co-produced through opening up data sets, encouraging reuse and remix, and building up a network of enthusiastic and capable active audiences, the techno-elites, whose status has been encouraged the open data culture and alike. Lessons learned can help understand the meanings of open data from the PSB perspective, and the implications in media industry thereby foster innovation in future media and creative industries

The State of Open Data

It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come

Journalism visualization devices: six visual modes of seeing

The growing number of visualization devices in the online jour- nalism world draws attention to the mechanisms both technical and symbolic that build the relation between the producer and the user in the interaction with the device. This relation has been studied in different approaches and empirical research; some of them related to the visual studies field. This paper aims to con- tribute to the study of the visual aspects of this relation through the analysis of the implicit representation of the user that the producer depicts into the device. This symbolic approach tends to find the guidance operation for interaction as a prescriptive model of information consumption focused in the visual representation. This paper propose six-visual modes for this guidance operation as the established models in the current online journalism: (1) visualization of events, (2) visualization of hidden issues, (3) visualization of spaces, (4) visualization of narratives, (5) visuali- zation of the subject involved with data and (6) visualization of convergences. These six modes are defined and their characteris- tics explicated

Humanitarianism 2.0

It is difficult to overstate the importance of trust in a world where global networks facilitate the constant flow of contradictory information. The search for verifiable leads and trusted sources is a central facet of daily communication and is becoming more so as our connections with one another become more decontextualised, geographically distant and, increasingly entirely virtual. The swell of internet connection rates across the world has meant an explosion of interaction and allowed new opportunities for global collective action. Whilst countless words have been written exploring the dangers of this global network and the threats that “new media” represents to social structures and moral fabrics, this collection seeks to explore the role that new social technologies are having in the world of humanitarianism and conflict response

The role of the Big Geographic Sort in Online News Circulation among U.S. Reddit Users

Past research has attributed the circulation of online news to two main factors—individual characteristics (e.g., a person’s information literacy) and social media efects (e.g., algorithmmediated information difusion)—and has overlooked a third one: the critical mass created by the ofine self-segregation of Americans into like-minded geographical regions such as states (a phenomenon called ‘The Big Sort’). We hypothesized that this latter factor matters for the online spreading of news not least because online interactions, despite having the potential of being global, end up being localized: interaction probability is known to rapidly decay with distance. Upon analysis of more than 8M Reddit comments containing news links spanning four years, from January 2016 to December 2019, we found that Reddit did not work as an ‘hype machine’ for news (as opposed to what previous work reported for other platforms, circulation was not mainly caused by platform-facilitated network efects). Rather, news circulation in Reddit worked as a supply-and-demand system: news items scaled linearly with the number of users in each state (with a scaling exponent β ≈ 1, and a goodness of ft R2 ≈ 0.95). Furthermore, deviations from such a universal pattern were best explained by state-level personality and cultural factors (R2 ≈ {0.12, 0.39}), rather than socioeconomic conditions (R2 ≈ {0.15, 0.29}) or political characteristics (R2 ≈ {0.06, 0.21}). Higher-than-expected circulation of any type of news was found in states characterised by residents who tend to be less diligent in terms of their personality (low in conscientiousness) and by loose cultures understating the importance of adherence to norms (low in cultural tightness). Interestingly, the combination of those factors with low levels of education was then associated with the circulation of a particular type of news, that is, misinformation. These results suggest that online interactions are geographically bounded and, as such, news circulation cannot be studied purely as an Internet phenomenon but should be grounded into a user’s ofine cultural environment, which has become increasingly segregated over the decades, and is admittedly hard to change

MIL Cities and MIL Citizens: Informed, Engaged, Empowered by Media and Information Literacy (MIL).

Libro completoThe UNESCO UNITWIN Cooperation Programme on Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue (MILID) is based on an initiative from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC). This Network was created in line with UNESCO’s mission and objectives, as well as the mandate of UNAOC, to serve as a catalyst and facilitator helping to give impetus to innovative projects aimed at reducing polarization among nations and cultures through mutual partnerships. This UNITWIN Network is composed of universities from different geographical areas: Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), University of the West Indies (Jamaica), Cairo University (Egypt), University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Temple University (USA), Tsinghua University (China), Moulay Ismail University (Morocco), Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University (Morocco), University of Guadalajara (Mexico), Western University (Canada), University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Sorbonne Nouvelle University (France), Punjabi University, Patiala (India), University of the South Pacific (Fiji), University of South Africa (South Africa), Nnamdi Azikiwe University (Nigeria), Ahmadu Bello University (Nigeria), Lagos State University (Nigeria), University of Jors (Nigeria), University of Calabar (Nigeria), Hosei University (Japan), University of Latvia (Latvia), Moscow Pedagogical State University (Russia), Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios UNIMINUTO (Colombia), Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), MICA (India), University of Campinas (Brazil). The main objectives of the Network are to foster collaboration among member universities, to build capacity in each of the countries in order to empower them to advance media and information literacy and intercultural dialogue, and to promote freedom of speech, freedom of information and the free flow of ideas and knowledge. Specific objectives include acting as an observatory for the role of media and information literacy (MIL) in promoting civic participation, democracy and development as well as enhancing intercultural and cooperative research on MIL. The programme also aims at promoting global actions related to MIL and intercultural dialogue. In such a context, a MILID Yearbook series is an important initiative. This MILID Yearbook is a result of a collaboration between UNESCO UNITWIN Cooperation Programme on Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue, The Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios - UNIMINUTO (Colombia) and the University of Gothenburg (Sweden)

The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 50 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for journalistic purposes. It also gives a “behind the scenes” look at the social lives of data sets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organizations, start-ups, civil society organizations and beyond. The book includes sections on “doing issues with data,” “assembling data,” “working with data,” “experiencing data,” “investigating data, platforms and algorithms,” “organizing data journalism,” “learning data journalism together” and “situating data journalism.

Open data today and tomorrow: the present challenges and possibilities of open data

This paper argues that because of the present challenges of open data, existing datasets such as governmental open data are limiting the potential possibilities of open data application development. The primary challenges in using open data are the formats in which open data are made available, the digital literacy required to exploit it, and the copyright issues that arise from commercial use. Hackathons provide some creative solutions but are reserved for the 'techno-elite'. In contrast, a new trend is developing in sensor-based purpose-gathered citizen-led open data that can be used to create meaningful interactions with participants and develop open data applications and systems that can serve a particular local area and group of people. This paper draws from the experiences of the members of the London-based collective Cybersalon and the 2014-2015 HyperHabitat series of events, projects, presentations, and hackathons that investigated the changing nature of our living environments