On Instagram, 58 photos appear per second. Every minute, we upload 72 hours of video to YouTube and 35,000 photos to Facebook. The amount of data that continuously surrounds us is enormous. Everything that happens in the world, you can follow. But how do you know what is real? Markham Nolan explains in his TED talk how he deals with this search.
When Hurricane Sandy raged across the United States, many photos of New York City appeared, list to data says Markham Nolan . Many of the images were questioned, because the lighting, for example, did not seem quite right. Was Avenue C really flooded or was it photoshopped? Who could you trust? Searching for the source turned out to be the crux: because the photos appeared to come from reliable bloggers, people knew for sure that the images were real.
Filter and indicate
Finding, filtering and interpreting the source is something journalists need to do more than ever. Credibility is increasingly demonstrated via Twitter. Following the right Twitter list, compiled by a reliable expert, is crucial. Fortunately, there are more tools and algorithms to do research than ever. In this TED talk, Nolan shows how you can do research as a journalist, but also as a consumer. Computers, however, work in binary: it is black or white. And the truth is never binary: the truth is emotional and human. The human factor will therefore never disappear.