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| '''Draft Project Proposal''' | | '''5 sources''' |
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| News on the web can be edited quickly as new facts arrive, and more is learned. Typos can be quickly corrected–but content can also be modified for a multitude of purposes. Often these changes instantly render the previous version invisible. Many newspapers use their website as a place for their first drafts, which allows them to craft a story in near real time, while being the first to publish breaking news.
| | <br>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449367615?tag=oreonbl-20 Mining the Social Web] |
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| News travels fast in social media as it is shared and reshared across all kinds of networks of relationships. What if that initial, perhaps flawed version goes viral, and it is the only version you ever read? It’s not necessarily fake news, because there’s no explicit intent to mislead or deceive, but it may not be the best, most accurate news either. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to watch how news stories shift in time to better understand how the news is produced? Or as Jeanine Finn memorably put it: how do we understand the news before truth gets its pants on?
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| As part of MITH’s participation in the Documenting the Now project we’ve been working on an experimental utility called diffengine to help track how news is changing. It relies on an old and quietly ubiquitous standard called RSS. RSS is a data format for syndicating content on the Web. In other words it’s an automated way of sharing what’s changing on your website, and for following what changes on someone else’s. News organizations use it heavily. When you listen to a podcast you’re using RSS. If you have a blog or write on Medium an RSS feed is quietly being generated for you whenever you write a new post.
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| NewsDiffs on the other hand provides a comprehensive framework for watching changes on multiple news sites (Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc).
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| To do its work diffengine keeps a small database of feeds, feed entries and version histories that it uses to notice when content has changed.
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| This database could be a valuable source of research data, or small data, for the study of media production, or the way organizations or people communicate online. One possible direction we are considering is creating a simple web frontend for this database that allows you to navigate the changed content without requiring SQL chops.
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| Perhaps diffengine could also create its own private archive of the web content. Keeping the archive private could help address ethical concerns around documenting particular individuals or communities when conducting research.
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