News cartography and epistemic authority in the era of big data: Journalists as map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects

Usher, Nikki

doi:10.1177/1461444819856909

Cited by 31 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…On the contrary, when journalists create digital maps, they rarely are the original cartographers or data producers. Thus, journalists are epistemologically vulnerable to other people’s mistakes (Usher, in press). In the case of the 2016 electoral maps, journalists were often at the mercy of polls conducted by others.…”

Section: A Place-centered Path Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting “Place” in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News

Usher

2019

Journalism & Communication Monographs

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The U.S. journalism industry is facing unprecedented challenges from questions of economic stability, rising antimedia sentiment among the government and the public, new technologies that have democratizing effects on news production, and the lowest levels of trust in journalism in decades. At the same time, the United States is facing structural inequality and political polarization that has taken on a distinctly place-based dimension. Taken together, the places of news have changed, both because of forces inside and outside journalism: The places where journalists do their work have changed, not only in an immediate sense of their own work routines but also because of the larger place-based realignment in the United States. This monograph argues that place must be at the center of scholarly and industry analysis to better understand the challenges to professional journalism today.

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Section: A Place-centered Path Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting “Place” in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News

Usher

2019

Journalism & Communication Monographs

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“…As it has been noted, 'with the millions upon millions of individuals looking at maps, charts and other visualisations of the pandemic on a daily basis, the potential for such a massive amount of information to mislead is significant, even in the absence of an intentional effort to distract or discount.' (Shelton, 2020, p. 4; see also Mooney and Juhàsz, 2020;Usher, 2020) It is exactly because global quantitative measurements matter that it is important to be aware of their limitations. Users of global numbers, beware!…”

Section: Ten Global Measurements Under Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hazards and fallacies of social measurements: global indicators in the pandemic

Infantino

2021

International Journal of Law in Context

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Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to quantitatively measure the global health situation and/or governments’ reaction vis-à-vis the pandemic have flourished. In spite of the significance of data in the fight against the pandemic, however, such global knowledge is largely questionable, insofar as it exposes itself to the many hazards and fallacies associated with global attempts to frame the social world in numbers. This is why the paper attempts to identify the hazards and fallacies most commonly associated with global measurements of social phenomena and to verify whether and to what extent these hazards and fallacies affect numerical representations of the pandemic and its effects. To this end, the paper analyses ten English-language global numerical initiatives that were launched between January and May 2020, and reviews them in light of existing critical literature on global numbers. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of global measurements of health and related law-and-policy measures, and to suggest caution about their use as a basis for knowledge and action in the context of the pandemic.

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“…If the political economy one is about suspicion over platforms and their sources, this one is about the ways in which platformed news simultaneously cast themselves as a cure to disinformation, whether it is by developing their own technical verification hubs or by using third-party fact-checking agencies, like Bellingcat and Stopfake.org, to verify their UGC sources (Seo 2020). What these technologies seek to achieve is to compensate for journalists’ absence from the scene of action, what Usher (2020) calls their ‘place-based authority’, by bringing them closer to that scene and, through scrutiny of available UGC, helping them to re-attach truth value to their news stories. It is, in particular, computational toolkits, including metadata, geolocation devices, satellite imaging or the frame-by-frame examination of CCTV sequences that, together with the use of local sources, enable journalists to combine the hermeneutic epistemology of the traditional newsroom with the technical expertise of, what Thurman calls, ‘digital forensics’ (2017).…”

Section: Ugc and Conflict Journalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news

Chouliaraki

Al-Ghazzi

2021

Journalism

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Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

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News cartography and epistemic authority in the era of big data: Journalists as map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects

Cited by 31 publications

References 57 publications

Putting “Place” in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News

Putting “Place” in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News

Hazards and fallacies of social measurements: global indicators in the pandemic

Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news

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