Page 25 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

The Internet has brought media and the power of communication to another level and therefore the entire manifestation and exchange of culture and expression.The digitalisation of information and open access to knowledge has brought power to the people. With open channels and freedom of expression, the exchange of opinion and the opportunity for spreading the news has become openly available, though this does not mean that just becausethe channels are open now the information they transmit is necessarily truthful.Analysing social mediaDuring the riots of 2012 in London, while working at The Guardian newspaper, one of the projects assigned to the interactive team was to analyse the power of Twitter as the main form of communication among not only journalists but in particular the population.An interdisciplinary team of academics and some advanced web technologies were behind one of our most ambitious visualisations to date.Jonathan Richards, former Guardian Interactive editor, now at Google Ideas Australia, explains it as follows:Throughout the UK riots, many scanned the internet in search of reliable information. In the absence of con rmed news, the web was often the only way of tracking events. Amidst the hubbub, countless topics came and went. As worries mounted, speculation grew. Rare individuals requested sources, countered hearsay, sought the truth. The rise and fall of rumours on Twitter is a striking display of social forces in action.Asked to produce an interactive visualisation for the Reading the Riots project, we resolved to nd a way to show the birth and death of rumours on Twitter. The result is one of the most ambitious pieces we have ever built, both in terms of dataanalysis and dynamic graphics. Its purpose: to display how misinformation corrects itself in open, unregulated forums.Our initial source was a corpus of 2.6 million tweets provided by Twitter, all of which ‘related to’ the riots by virtue of containing at least one of a series of hashtags.The rst challenge was to work out which rumours we should track, and how to isolate tweets that related to these rumours. Working in conjunction with journalists who’d covered the story, we identi ed seven key rumours, ranging from the frivolous (that army tanks had been deployed in the City of London) to the more sobering (that the Tottenham riots began with the police beating a 16-year-old girl).The fact that the ‘channels are open’ doesn’t mean that the news, opinions and rumours social media users transmit are necessarily truthful.With help from an interdisciplinary team of researchers1 at the Universities of Manchester, St Andrews and Leicester, we distilled the overall corpus down to a series of subsets relatedto each rumour. We then undertook a more hands-on approach to nd the tweets that best represented each story.Next came the task of visualising the ‘ ow’ ofa particular rumour as it took ight. Lookingto projects like Bloom’s Fizz for inspiration, we decided upon an aesthetic that shows tweets as circles grouped into larger circles. In our case, this grouping would place the items into clusters – each comprising a set of retweets for a given tweet.To make this work, we needed to nd which tweets belong to each cluster. Again, our academic partners proved invaluable, providing a parametrised Levenshtein distance algorithm for nding all tweets within a certain ‘distance’ from each other in textual terms.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201625Smart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation