Prototyping Personography for The Yellow Nineties Online:

Hedley, Alison; Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen

doi:10.5749/j.ctv9hj9r9.13

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The crawler component uses jsoup [27] to create all of its network connections and also parse the resulting HTML pages using methods that allow for familiar CSS-like selectors. We also make local text dumps of the bulk of website contents, which are afterwards picked up by our implementation of Apache Lucene [19], creating indexes for quick text searches and comparisons.…”

Section: Back-endmentioning

confidence: 99%

NewsCompare - A novel application for detecting news influence in a country

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2019

SoftwareX

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The concept of "fake news" has been referenced and thrown around in news reports so much in recent years that it has become a news topic in its own right. At its core, it poses a chilling question -what do we do if our worldview is fundamentally wrong? Even if internally consistent, what if it does not match the real world? Are our beliefs justified, or could we become indoctrinated from living in a "bubble"? If the latter is true, how could we even test the limits of said bubble from within its confines?Without delving into advanced epistemology (i.e. fundamentally "how do we know that we know?"), one of the obvious key requirements is avoiding a reliance on a single source of information. This is no easy task, considering the relative scarcity of truly independent news publishing companies, compared to say, massive conglomerates pushing a certain agenda under different publication names, or (possibly worse) state-sponsored propaganda. Fact-checkers going through articles individually can only do so much, before buckling under the never-ending deluge of information coming out, ranging from nearly-correct to completely fabricated.We propose a new method to augment this process, by speeding up and automating the more cumbersome and time-consuming tasks involved. Our application, NewsCompare takes any list of target websites as input (news-related in our use case, but otherwise not restricted), visits them in parallel and retrieves any text content found within. Web pages are subsequently compared to each other, and similarities are tentatively pointed out. These results can be manually verified in order to determine which websites tend to draw inspiration from one another. The data gathered on every intermediate step can be queried and analyzed separately, and most notably we already use the set of hyperlinks to and from the various websites we encounter to paint a sort of "map" of that particular slice of the web. This map can then be cross-referenced and further strengthen the conclusion that a particular grouping of sites with strong links to each other, and posting similar content, are likely to share the same allegiance.We run our application on the Romanian news websites and we draw several interesting observations.

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Section: Back-endmentioning

confidence: 99%