[Air-L] Public event on "Studying the Social Life of Fake News Online", King's College London, Wed 11th October, 6-7.30pm

[Gray, Jonathan]

For those of you near London, we’re hosting a public event on "Studying the Social Life of Fake News Online" at King's College London, Wed 11th October, 6-7.30pm.

Further details are copied below and at the following link (where you can also register):
http://sociallifefakenews.eventbrite.co.uk
https://twitter.com/kingsdh/status/915194927100960768

This draws on the Field Guide to Fake News by a network of researchers around the Public Data Lab<http://publicdatalab.org/>, which we’re currently developing into a book project: http://fakenews.publicdatalab.org/

Any help in sharing this to relevant friends and colleagues would be much appreciated.

All the best,

Jonathan

--
Jonathan Gray | jonathangray.org<http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg<http://twitter.com/jwyg>
Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies
Department of Digital Humanities
King’s College London



DESCRIPTION
How can fake news be studied? What can we learn from efforts to map and understand the production, circulation and reception of fake news online? At this event two leading digital methods researchers – Tommaso Venturini<http://www.tommasoventurini.it/> and Liliana Bounegru<http://lilianabounegru.org/> – will present new empirical research on fake news and misinformation online, including the Public Data Lab<http://publicdatalab.org/>'s Field Guide to Fake News<http://fakenews.publicdatalab.org/>. Studying the social life of fake news tells us not only about the practices of misinformation producers and the counter-responses of debunkers. We can also learn about the broader effects and dynamics of online platforms and digital media ecosystems in organising public deliberation, attention, culture and politics in the contemporary moment. The event will be hosted by Mark Coté<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/people/academic/cote/index.aspx> and Jonathan Gray<http://jonathangray.org/> at the Department for Digital Humanities<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/index.aspx>, King's College London<http://kcl.ac.uk/>.

On the Study of Popular Subjects or Confessions of a Fake News Scholar - Tommaso Venturini
Because of their relative simplicity (fake stories are usually "flatter" than ordinary news stories), their exaggeration (which makes it easier to detect and follow them), their geographical diffusion (scholars have identified examples of it in most countries of the world), their rapid reproduction and elevated mutation rate (fake news rise and fall in weeks and often in days), fake news may be the drosophila melanogaster of media studies.
The drosophila is a little and relatively common fly (often found around ripe fruits), which assumed a crucial importance in the history of genetics. Because of reasons similar to the ones just listed, the drosophila became the ‘model organism’ for genetic research allowing to qualify and quantify a series of intuitions about gene reproduction (Kohler, 1994). As the drosophila facilitated the birth of experimental chromosome mapping, so fake news may help the development of new forms of empiricalmedia mapping.
Not unlike rumours, digital viral contents provide a perfect illustration of the mechanism through which social phenomena are constructed according to Gabriel Tarde (1890). In his famous dispute with Emile Durkheim, Tarde refused the idea that underlying structures were the basis of social phenomena and claimed instead that their existence was to be searched in the imitation and alteration of individual behaviours (Latour, 2002). Tarde, however, found it difficult to defend its position empirically, because the research methods available at the time did not allow to follow the transmission and transformation of collective actions at the scale and with the sharpness demanded by his argument. This may be possible today thanks to the capacity of digital technologies to store and retrieve each of these movements of diffusion and mutation (Latour et al., 2012 and Boullier, 2015).
This paper will illustrate the opportunity offered by viral news to map the ‘regimes’ of circulation and mutation occurring of contemporary media systems by analysing two empirical case studies from the latest French presidential election: the “Macron is gay” hoax and the “Penelope Fillon” scandal.
Tommaso Venturini is recipient of the of an advanced research fellowship of INRIA (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) to work on social modelling at the Institut des Systèmes Complexes Rhône-Alpes. He is also a co-founder of and associate researcher at the médialab<http://medialab.sciences-po.fr/> of Sciences Po (Paris), and co-founder of the Public Data Lab<http://publicdatalab.org/>. More about him can be found on his website at tommasoventurini.it<http://www.tommasoventurini.it/wp/> and he is on Twitter at @tommasoventurin<https://twitter.com/tommasoventurin>.

Fake News in Digital Culture – Liliana Bounegru
This talk will present findings, challenges and lessons learned from a series of collaborative research projects examining fake news as a digital culture phenomenon. The projects were undertaken by the Public Data Lab, an interdisciplinary network convening researchers from digital humanities, media studies, Internet studies, digital sociology, and science and technology studies to facilitate research, public debate and engagement around the future of the data society. The talk draws on two publications. The first is A Field Guide to Fake News, which explores the use of digital methods to trace the production, circulation and reception of fake news online and which received media mentions in the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, NRC, Der Standard and Columbia Journalism Review. The second is Five Provocations About Fake News, a forthcoming research article drawing on insights and cautionary tales from science and technology studies to challenge some of the themes and assumptions that underlie current research and debates around fake news and proposing some concepts and analytical lenses to support future empirical social research around this topic.
Liliana Bounegru is a joint doctoral candidate in the Communication Sciences department at Ghent University, Belgium and the Media Studies and Journalism department at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research examines the extension of digital platforms and datafication into journalism. She is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab, member of the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and research associate at the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about her can be found at lilianabounegru.org<http://lilianabounegru.org/>and and she is on Twitter at @bb_liliana<http://twitter.com/bb_liliana>.