User:Francg/expub/thesis/thesis-outline-26.10.17

Thesis Outline

26.10.17

2 options here:

- What?
Research information overload generated by digital journalism, where big amounts of data content is quickly modified for different purposes and almost spread instantaneously. What is the effect on users? how does it reflects on public opinion?

- How?
Using "diffengine" and python programming tools to monitor RSS news feed from local and international online journals. "Feedme" will help me create an RSS feed from those journals that don't use such technology, but also from Facebook groups. Another tool, "Twarc" will help tracking social media messages from Twitter, which is a network highly involved in political activity. "MondoDB" or "SQL" data processing systems, will help stream manage live this generated input on a database, which it will be hosted on the local network of a Raspberry Pi.

- Why?
The thesis could be an alongside process of documenting the project, while researching on the ethical, functional and educational issues of information overload. It can also be followed by collaborations from entities or figures involved in this issue; they could be essays, interviews or other sort of provided info.

1 - My thesis will work hand-on-hand with the project; investigating information overload during the sociopolitical issue between Spain and Catalonia, which sometimes exceed our capacity for processing it and understanding it. News on the web can be edited quickly as new facts arrive, meaning information is quickly updated, re-written or corrected, although sometimes its content can be modified for different purposes. Online journalism often use their website as text processors for writing their first drafts, which allows them to quickly publish a story in nearly real time. It is possible that the only version of an article we ever read, gets shared across quickly, while more versions of this same article have been updated. Given such case it would be useful to be able to observe how information morphs or shifts in time to better understand them. Currently we live in a mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education and mass entertainment society that is simultaneously functioning as a weapon for mass misinformation, ranging from useful to inaccurate or unverified content.

The thesis could be an alongside process of documenting the project, while researching on the ethical, functional and educational issues of information overload, which tools have been explored or could be taken into consideration for further research.

2 - Thesis focus on the events of the 1st of October when a group of computer scientists or hackers made possible a registered universal census system, while struggling against power state. This research would point issues such as network censorship, online surveillance, tracking tools, cloning IPs, anonymity, freedom of speech, how a state can make Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook shut down applications, close websites, remove groups, etc that were meant to inform about a referendum, which regardless its non juridic validity it ended up happening.
Would it be possible to gather 7000-8000 w for this?

The thesis can be followed by collaborations from entities or figures involved in this issue; they could be essays, interviews or other sort of provided info.

- - -

Thesis outline is the most important part, it help us focus on what it matters:

what? - 1 or 2 sentences; what do I intend to research? communicate it to a reader with a different background who could understand it.
why? - What do we want to achieve with it? What is it the scope? Write down a few questions. What is supporting our statement?
how? - Conclusion that recaps the main arguments.

Qian: I get your intention of why you want to write this thesis, and what you're interested in.

For the next step, I'm curious to see how you would organize the structure, how you would put your thesis into different paragraphs. It seems to be more like an abstract than an outline for now.

For exa: would u put those interviews in an independent paragraph? And what would u like to talk about those interviews?