Journalism: New Challenges

In seeking to identify and critique a range of the most pressing challenges confronting journalism today, this book examines topics such as: the role of the journalist in a democratic society, including where questions of truth and free speech are concerned; the changing priorities of newspaper, radio, television, magazine, photography, and online news organisations; the political, economic and technological pressures on news and editorial independence; the impact of digital convergence on the forms and practices of newsgathering and storytelling; the dynamics of professionalism, such as the negotiation of impartiality and objectivity in news reports; journalists’ relationships with their sources, not least where the ‘spin’ of public relations shapes what’s covered, how and why; evolving genres of news reporting, including politics, business, sports, celebrity, documentary, war and peace journalism; journalism’s influence on its audiences, from moral panics to the trauma of representing violence and tragedy; the globalisation of news, including the role of international news agencies; new approaches to investigative reporting in a digital era; and the rise of citizen journalism, live-blogging and social media, amongst many others. The chapters are written in a crisp, accessible style, with a sharp eye to the key ideas, concepts, issues and debates warranting critical attention. Each ends with a set of ‘Challenging Questions’ to explore as you develop your own perspective, as well as a list of ‘Recommended Reading’ to help push the conversation onwards. May you discover much here that stimulates your thinking and, with luck, prompts you to participate in lively debate about the future of journalism

The Cowl - v.77 - n.16 - Feb 28, 2013

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 77 - No. 16 - February 28, 2013. 28 pages

Sociolinguistically Driven Approaches for Just Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) systems are now ubiquitous. Yet the benefits of these language technologies do not accrue evenly to all users, and indeed they can be harmful; NLP systems reproduce stereotypes, prevent speakers of non-standard language varieties from participating fully in public discourse, and re-inscribe historical patterns of linguistic stigmatization and discrimination. How harms arise in NLP systems, and who is harmed by them, can only be understood at the intersection of work on NLP, fairness and justice in machine learning, and the relationships between language and social justice. In this thesis, we propose to address two questions at this intersection: i) How can we conceptualize harms arising from NLP systems?, and ii) How can we quantify such harms? We propose the following contributions. First, we contribute a model in order to collect the first large dataset of African American Language (AAL)-like social media text. We use the dataset to quantify the performance of two types of NLP systems, identifying disparities in model performance between Mainstream U.S. English (MUSE)- and AAL-like text. Turning to the landscape of bias in NLP more broadly, we then provide a critical survey of the emerging literature on bias in NLP and identify its limitations. Drawing on work across sociology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and education, we provide an account of the relationships between language and injustice, propose a taxonomy of harms arising from NLP systems grounded in those relationships, and propose a set of guiding research questions for work on bias in NLP. Finally, we adapt the measurement modeling framework from the quantitative social sciences to effectively evaluate approaches for quantifying bias in NLP systems. We conclude with a discussion of recent work on bias through the lens of style in NLP, raising a set of normative questions for future work

The Cowl - v.82 - n.20 - Mar 22, 2018

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 82, Number 20 - March 22, 2018. 24 pages

The BG News February 5, 2010

The BGSU campus student newspaper February 5, 2010. Volume 100 - Issue 93https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/9196/thumbnail.jp

Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World: Platforms, Policy, Privacy, and Public Discourse

This publication is the second annual report of the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Centerfor Internet & Society at Harvard University. As with the inaugural report, this year’s edition is a collaborative effort of the extended Berkman community. Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World includes nearly three dozen contributions from friends and colleagues around the world that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year. The result, intended for a general interest audience, brings together reflection and analysis on a broad range of issues and regions — from an examination of Europe’s “right to be forgotten” to a review of the current state of mobile security to an exploration of a new wave of movements attempting to counter hate speech online — and offers it up for debate and discussion. Our goal remains not to provide a definitive assessment of the “state of the Internet” but rather to provide a rich compendium of commentary on the year’s developments with respect to the online space. Last year’s report examined the dynamics of Internet controls and online activity through the actions of government, corporations, and civil society. We focus this year on the interplay between technological platforms and policy; growing tensions between protecting personal privacy and using big data for social good; the implications of digital communications tools for public discourse and collective action; and current debates around the future of Internet governance. The report reflects the diversity of ideas and input the Internet Monitor project seeks to invite. Some of the contributions are descriptive; others prescriptive. Some contain purely factual observations; others offer personal opinion. In addition to those in traditional essay format, contributions this year include a speculative fiction story exploring what our increasingly data-driven world might bring, a selection of “visual thinking” illustrations that accompany a number of essays, a “Year in Review” timeline that highlights many of the year’s most fascinating Internet-related news stories (and an interactive version of which is available at the netmonitor.org), and a slightly tongue-in-cheek “By the Numbers” section that offers a look at the year’s important digital statistics. We believe that each contribution offers insights, and hope they provoke further reflection, conversation, and debate in both offline and online settings around the globe

Struggling to Remember: Perceptions, Potentials and Power in an Age of Mediatised Memory

What role do new, networked and pervasive technologies play in changing individual and collective memory processes? Many recent debates have focused on whether we are in the online era remembering ‘less’ or ‘more’ – informed, perhaps, by a tendency to think of memory spatially and quantifiably as working like an archive. Drawing on the philosophical theorising of Henri Bergson and its development through Gilbert Simondon, this thesis makes two interventions into the field. Firstly, conceptually, it establishes a process-based approach to perception, memory and consciousness in a shift away from the archive metaphor – thinking memory not as informing ‘knowledge of the past’ but ‘action in duration’. It situates the conscious, living being as transindividual – affectively relational to its perceived bodily and social environments, through psychic and collective individuation respectively. Moreover, it considers technologies as forms of transindividual extension of consciousness. Furthermore, it proposes the ‘antimetaphor’ of the anarchive as a conceptual tool with which to understand these durationbased, bodily and technological, action-oriented processes. Secondly, methodologically, it advocates a rephrasing of the question from how much we are remembering to how we are remembering differently. Armed now with a developed theoretical position and methodological approach, the thesis explores through three case-study chapters how personal and more historical pasts may be remembered, individually and more collectively, through new, prevalent technologies of memory such as search engines, forums and social-media sites. Analysing the material experiences of remembering, as well as examining the economic drives of the platforms and wider actors, and the resulting socio-political implications, the thesis sets out the original argument of a contemporary struggle for memory: a complex negotiation of tensions between agencies of the body, the social, and the multifarious and interconnected socio-political and economic interests of the technological platforms and hybridised media systems through which contemporary remembering increasingly takes place