news 2016

New research has revealed that by using big data to analyse massive data sets of modern and historical news, social media and Wikipedia page views, periodic patterns in the collective behaviour of the population can be observed that could otherwise go unnoticed. Academics from the University of Bristol's ThinkBIG project , led by Nello Cristianini , Professor of Artificial Intelligence, have published two papers that have analysed periodic patterns in daily media content and consumption: the first investigated historical newspapers, the second Twitter posts and Wikipedia visits.

Researchers have analysed data that reveals which plane crashes the public is interested in and why. They show the biases in the coverage of such events, even in open systems like Wikipedia.  The team from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) counted the number of page views and edits of Wikipedia articles about 1,500 plane crashes around the world to discover that a death toll of around 50 is the minimum threshold for predicting significant levels of public interest.

British citizens are worrying about their online presence in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks amid concerns over state surveillance, new research by Cardiff University has found. The first comprehensive study of its kind to examine the consequences of the Snowden revelations - led by the University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies - revealed that citizens have different strategies for coping with it.

You might think from anecdotal evidence that hate speech on social media by individuals and groups appears quite a lot, but one of first academic studies to examine the empirical data concludes that these extreme forms of speech on Facebook are marginal as compared with total content. Researchers from the University of Oxford and Addis Ababa University examined thousands of comments made by Ethiopians on Facebook during four months around the time of  Ethiopia's general election in 2015.

Researchers have shown that data mining techniques can be used to understand when Twitter users start displaying supportive behaviour to radical terror groups such as ISIS. Analysis of 154,000 Europe-based Twitter accounts and more than 104 million tweets (in English and Arabic) relating to Syria show that users of the social media platform are more likely to adopt pro-ISIS language - and therefore display potential signs of radicalisation - when connected to other Twitter users who are linked to many of the same accounts and share and retweet similar information.

A new study has found that seemingly positive media coverage of feminist campaigner Malala Yousafzai is actually full of patronising assumptions about women in Muslim countries. The study analysed more than 140,000 words of coverage of activist Yousafzai in the nine months after she was attacked by the Pakistani Taleban.

'Journalists in the UK' is a wide-ranging report of more than 60 pages, which captures journalists' views on matters relating to their profession. There are now around 64,000 professional journalists working in the UK. A new report reveals what they think of working in the media and how they operate post-Leveson.

Two new free projects being launched today by Cardiff University aim to provide the public with a better understanding of devolution in Wales ahead of the National Assembly elections in May. The two projects, an online booklet Guide to covering the National Assembly for Wales Election for Community Journalists and a new online course Scotland and Wales Vote 2016: Understanding the Devolved Elections, will provide people in Wales with the knowledge to better understand the forthcoming Welsh General Election in May.

New research using Artificial Intelligence finds men's views and voices more prominent than women's It has long been argued that women are under-represented and marginalised in relation to men in the world's news media. New research, by Bristol and Cardiff universities, using artificial intelligence (AI), has analysed over two million articles to find out how gender is represented in online news.