The Brown Institute is pleased to support four seed grants for the 2020-2021 Season. These include:
Automatic Identification of Online Harassment of Women Journalists
Community Networking for Community Storytelling in Appalachia
Project Immerse
The Right to be Forgotten in U.S. Newsrooms
Detailed descriptions of each of the projects can be found below.
Automatic Identification of Online Harassment of Women Journalists
The Automatic Identification of Online Harassment of Women Journalists will develop methods to identify abusive and hateful speech targeting female journalists on social media. The project will work with journalists to collect a large-scale corpus of private harassment messages received by journalists on Twitter, and to develop an easily-employed annotation method for labeling messages by degree of observed harassment, collecting self-labeled data from journalists. They will use automated Natural Language Processing methods to extract features from these messages and to build Machine Learning classifiers to distinguish between harassing or abusive and neutral messages. These classifiers will be integrated into a tool for journalists to use to manage their Twitter feeds to identify and segregate these messages.
The Team
Community Networking for Community Storytelling in Appalachia
The Community Networking for Community Storytelling in Appalachia will build on their existing efforts to develop community owned communications infrastructure and use it as a platform for storytelling. Through this, the project will highlight the ongoing efforts of the residents of the Clearfork Valley in rural Eastern Tennessee to build transformational resilience in the face of the impacts of the coal industry and a changing climate.
The Team
Project Immerse
In a time of deep fakes, conspiracy theories, and AI-driven writing and social networking scams, we are surrounded by manipulative and deceptive technologies that, in the wrong hands, could constitute an existential threat to our society. Project Immerse will apply a learning methodology the team has called “attract and educate” to create an immersive educational experience using existing technologies, specifically the Miro collaborative platform and Zoom, to tell stories featuring these malicious techniques. Building an anthology series akin to Black Mirror, the project will create “episodes” that deal with the ways misinformation manifests on the internet, drawn out to their potential dramatic and powerful conclusions. Each episode will be a standalone piece of entertainment built in web native technologies, but at the end of each episode Project Immerse takes users behind the scenes and gives them access to the actual tools to play with on their own.
The Team
The Right to be Forgotten
The Right to be Forgotten in U.S. Newsrooms will research and create guidelines for newsrooms to “unpublish” obsolete content — such as stories about crimes that are now sealed by courts, reports about arrests that never led to charges, and factually inaccurate information. Through consultation with experts in philosophy, ethics, journalism, civic nonprofits, international relations, law, government, internet technology, and big data, the project will consider not just situations when content should be unpublished, but also examine concrete technical steps newsrooms can follow to securely and correctly remove the articles in question.