Journal papers by Theodora Saridou
Heliyon, 2023
Social media platforms have led to the creation of a vast amount of information produced by users... more Social media platforms have led to the creation of a vast amount of information produced by users and published publicly, facilitating participation in the public sphere, but also giving the opportunity for certain users to publish hateful content. This content mainly involves offensive/discriminative speech towards social groups or individuals (based on racial, religious, gender or other characteristics) and could possibly lead into subsequent hate actions/crimes due to persistent escalation. Content management and moderation in big data volumes can no longer be supported manually. In the current research, a web framework is presented and evaluated for the collection, analysis, and aggregation of multilingual textual content from various online sources. The framework is designed to address the needs of human users, journalists, academics, and the public to collect and analyze content from social media and the web in Spanish, Italian, Greek, and English, without prior training or a background in Computer Science. The backend functionality provides content collection and monitoring, semantic analysis including hate speech detection and sentiment analysis using machine learning models and rule-based algorithms, storing, querying, and retrieving such content along with the relevant metadata in a database. This functionality is assessed through a graphic user interface that is accessed using a web browser. An evaluation procedure was held through online questionnaires, including journalists and students, proving the feasibility of the use of the proposed framework by non-experts for the defined use-case scenarios.
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Societies, 2023
Artificial intelligence (AI) has constituted a significant scholarly object over the past few dec... more Artificial intelligence (AI) has constituted a significant scholarly object over the past few decades, profoundly impacting a broad spectrum of academic and industrial fields. The area of AI has exploded in recent years along with participatory tools and media environments. Although the utilization of such algorithmic approaches and technologies offers significant benefits for society, the need to consider arising risks and challenges is strong. Thus, a multidisciplinary approach can shape the context for a deeper understanding and the harmless use of AI without overlooking the constantly evolving (technological) landscape. The current call for papers (CfP) aims at further enlightening the above perspectives. We invite researchers to submit original/featured research works related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:
AI techniques in participatory tools and collaborative environments;
AI ethics;
AI education and multidisciplinary literacy needs;
Audience engagement in data crowdsourcing and annotation tasks;
Datasets utilization, ethics, and legal concerns in AI;
Participatory media, journalism, and AI perspectives;
Hate speech detection using AI;
Hate crime prevention using AI;
AI tools in misinformation and disinformation detection;
AI-assisted forensics tools: legal and ethical concerns;
AI-assisted management of media assets and/or use rights: technological and ethical concerns;
Technological and ethical concerns of big data;
Smart systems for education and collaborative working environments;
AI-assisted citizen science: Technological limitation, ethics, and training concerns.
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Future Internet, 2021
Social media services make it possible for an increasing number of people to express their opinio... more Social media services make it possible for an increasing number of people to express their opinion publicly. In this context, large amounts of hateful comments are published daily. The PHARM project aims at monitoring and modeling hate speech against refugees and migrants in Greece, Italy, and Spain. In this direction, a web interface for the creation and the query of a multi-source database containing hate speech-related content is implemented and evaluated. The selected sources include Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook comments and posts, as well as comments and articles from a selected list of websites. The interface allows users to search in the existing database, scrape social media using keywords, annotate records through a dedicated platform and contribute new content to the database. Furthermore, the functionality for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis of texts is provided, making use of novel methods and machine learning models. The interface can be accessed online w...
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Journalism Practice, 2021
Greece, Italy, and Spain are the Southern European borders and the main entrances for migrants an... more Greece, Italy, and Spain are the Southern European borders and the main entrances for migrants and refugees to Europe, a movement that was particularly visible after the 2015 "refugee crisis of the Mediterranean." In this context, immigration is used as a political tool, and the object of major media coverage. However, previous studies have shown that this coverage tends to be partial and prejudiced. This study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, uses the frame building theory to study the perceptions of journalists covering migration issues regarding ways to improve the representation of migrants in the media of these three countries. For that, in-depth interviews were conducted with 94 Greek, Italian, and Spanish journalists. The precarity of the profession, the focus on conflictive approaches, and discrimination based on national origin or religion are mentioned as the biggest challenges. Professionals covering this information demand more individualized and deeper coverage, giving the migrants' condition greater visibility, and giving voice to the migrants themselves, as they are the protagonists of the stories. Greater attention to journalistic ethics and the defense of vulnerable groups is considered essential to achieve this.
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Social Sciences Journal, 2022
The exploitation of data in the media industry has always played a significant role. This is espe... more The exploitation of data in the media industry has always played a significant role. This is especially evident today, since data (and in many cases big data) are generated through various activities that relate to the production and also consumption of news. This paper attempts to highlight the importance of big data utilization in the media industry. Specifically, it discusses cases of big data exploitation, such as media content consumption and management, data journalism production, social content utilization, and participatory journalism applications. The study also examines the changes that big data has introduced in all stages of the journalism practice, from news production to news distribution, by utilizing the available tools. Finally, it discusses new developments that relate to semantic web (Web 3.0) technologies, which have already started to be adopted by media organizations around the world.
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During the last two decades, citizens' participation in news production process has attracted sig... more During the last two decades, citizens' participation in news production process has attracted significant interest from both academia and the media industry. Media production and consumption have been altered considerably and traditional concepts, such as gatekeeping, have been under discussion. Many news organisations include in their websites tools and applications that allow users to be active consumers or even co-producers of journalistic content, by liking, sharing, commenting and submitting material. At the same time, large amounts of user-generated content are uploaded every day on social media platforms. Subsequently, media organisations must deal with continually available information which requires management, classification and evaluation not only to keep high journalistic standards, but also to avoid problems. The latter category can include grammar mistakes, fake or misleading information and hate speech. All the above-mentioned parameters highlight the obvious need for platforms that can support journalism manage practice. Such a platform should utilise semantic technologies, which can support organised collection and moderation of content in an effective way and in short time. This study discusses the design and the implementation of a participatory journalism management platform.
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Styles of Communication , 2019
During the last two decades, the new media landscape has often been explored through the lens of ... more During the last two decades, the new media landscape has often been explored through the lens of audience participation in news production process. The diffusion of user-generated content both in news websites and on social media platforms has led media organizations to employ participatory formats that allow the audience to actively consume or co-produce content. As a result, journalists are often challenged by a vast amount of-vulnerable to problems-content that has to be handled in tandem with their other daily tasks. This paper focuses on the development of participatory journalism practices in Greek media. Specifically, in order to examine opportunities for users' involvement in news organizations, a comparative quantitative study in all national daily political and financial online newspapers in Greece was conducted in 2014 and 2018. For this purpose, both the integration of participatory tools and the use of quality assurance methods in the relative websites were investigated. The findings indicate a rather reluctant attitude towards productive ways of engagement. Participation takes place through a limited number of tools and user-generated content is accepted only when filtered.
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Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication (JEICOM), , 2019
During the last two decades, citizens' participation in news production process has raised great ... more During the last two decades, citizens' participation in news production process has raised great academic and entrepreneurial interest for participatory journalism. Traditional procedures and concepts such as gatekeeping have been under discussion. News organizations redesign their websites in order to adopt tools and applications that make it possible for users to be active consumers or even co-producers of journalistic content, by liking, sharing, commenting and submitting material. At the same time, huge amounts of user-generated content are uploaded every minuteon social media platforms. Subsequently, professionals have to deal with continually available information which requires management, classification and evaluation in order to keep high journalistic standards and to avoid problems, varying from plain grammar mistakes to serious situations of fake news, hostility or hate speech. Thus, there is the obvious need for a new model of managing participatory journalism, based on semantic technologies, which will support organized collection and moderation of content in an effective way and in short time. The main objective of this paper is to define the requirements and describe the characteristics that the model should have. For this purpose, two online surveys of journalists and users were conducted in Greece, in order to gain some insights concerning the development of the model. The paper presents the key findings from the surveys and identifies the views, the preferences and the experiences as expressed by the respondents, which lead to the tendency towards a collaborative, semantic-oriented way of submitting and receiving user-generated content.
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A case study in news articles, users comments and a Facebook group for Article 3 of the Greek Constitution, 2019
This study is concerned with Article 3 of the Greek Constitution and the relations between the St... more This study is concerned with Article 3 of the Greek Constitution and the relations between the State and the Church in Greece. The scientific views expressed regarding the Third Article of the Constitution were examined with emphasis on the public debate that developed around the interpretation of the terms 'prevailing religion' and 'holy canons'. Moreover, the results of two studies carried out are presented in order to approach the issue from a journalistic perspective. The first research was conducted on websites to see how media are contributing to the debate on what Article 3 stipulates. The second research looked at how citizens directly related to journalism and communication perceive the stipulations of this Article. The results revealed how Article 3 of the Constitution is in question in its current form and how, in the future, it could be fairer to all Greek citizens via an open and multidimensional dialogue.
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Journal of Media Critiques , 2018
The proliferation of User-Generated Content (UGC) has led to catalytic changes both in the news p... more The proliferation of User-Generated Content (UGC) has led to catalytic changes both in the news production process and in the journalist-audience relationship. Media organizations redesign their strategies, by adopting tools of participatory journalism through which amateurs' comment on stories, submit material for publication or share articles. Furthermore, a large amount of content becomes constantly available on social media platforms, enhancing the need of continuous monitoring and effective management. However, the coexistence of professional and amateur content raises significant issues, forcing media organizations to spend resources in order to ensure quality. Except for traditional methods, modern collection, management and validation methods are often based on semantic web services. The paper aims to offer an in-depth description of the already available semantic analysis tools in the context of participatory journalism, seeking to identify the existing use of semantic technology for UGC exploitation and to propose a model for semantic annotation of UGC.
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Digital Journalism , 2017
Scholars conceptualize journalism's transformation and explain the changes occurring at different... more Scholars conceptualize journalism's transformation and explain the changes occurring at different levels under the rubric of convergence. Contrary to optimistic views of convergence claiming for its potential to satisfy both good journalism and good business practices, the paper argues that at times of economic uncertainty, hyper-competition and diminishing accountability levels, convergence is used as a cost-effective strategy fostering low-cost and spreadable news production. Engaging in quantitative analysis, the article provides empirical evidence showing that the recycling of news content from established elite sources and across popular news sites has increased between 2013 and 2016 posing serious threats for content plurality and independent reporting. Despite online journalism's development as a field, and the appearance of social networks and UGC as alternative and easy-accessible sources, a pervasive survival and monetization culture has turned churning into a mainstream journalistic practice.
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Number 1, 1 April 2016, pp. 85-101(17).
This article examines the integration of participatory journalism policies in the websites of Gre... more This article examines the integration of participatory journalism policies in the websites of Greek daily political and financial newspapers. A survey conducted in these websites revealed a very reluctant attitude towards tools and applications that involve users in the production of news. The study identified the adoption of few and limited user-generated content (UGC) initiatives, which mainly allow readers to interact with the journalists’ work after it has been published, rather than produce their own content or take part in the initial stages of news production process. When users can create their content, this process is regulated by rules set by the editors. Furthermore, it was found that Greek newspapers use a number of methods, such as moderation, registration and CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), in order to avoid problems caused by the coexistence of professional and amateur content and to ensure the quality of their websites.
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Conference papers by Theodora Saridou
9th International Conference of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023
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2nd annual Greek-language conference of Communication Labs, 2023
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152nd Audio Engineering Society (AES Convention), 2022
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Voices of the voiceless: New challenges of mobilization and citizen engagement, 2019
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4th International Conference on Communication & Management (ICCM2018), 2018
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5th Annual International Conference on Communication and Management, Athens , 2019
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Future of Journalism Conference: Innovations, Transitions and Transformations, Cardiff, 2019
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17th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Interact, Paphos, 2019
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Journal papers by Theodora Saridou
AI techniques in participatory tools and collaborative environments;
AI ethics;
AI education and multidisciplinary literacy needs;
Audience engagement in data crowdsourcing and annotation tasks;
Datasets utilization, ethics, and legal concerns in AI;
Participatory media, journalism, and AI perspectives;
Hate speech detection using AI;
Hate crime prevention using AI;
AI tools in misinformation and disinformation detection;
AI-assisted forensics tools: legal and ethical concerns;
AI-assisted management of media assets and/or use rights: technological and ethical concerns;
Technological and ethical concerns of big data;
Smart systems for education and collaborative working environments;
AI-assisted citizen science: Technological limitation, ethics, and training concerns.
Conference papers by Theodora Saridou
AI techniques in participatory tools and collaborative environments;
AI ethics;
AI education and multidisciplinary literacy needs;
Audience engagement in data crowdsourcing and annotation tasks;
Datasets utilization, ethics, and legal concerns in AI;
Participatory media, journalism, and AI perspectives;
Hate speech detection using AI;
Hate crime prevention using AI;
AI tools in misinformation and disinformation detection;
AI-assisted forensics tools: legal and ethical concerns;
AI-assisted management of media assets and/or use rights: technological and ethical concerns;
Technological and ethical concerns of big data;
Smart systems for education and collaborative working environments;
AI-assisted citizen science: Technological limitation, ethics, and training concerns.