Translatedesk: Social Translation for Social Media

co-written by Ed Bice, Tom Trewinnard and An Xiao Mina When Barack Obama made his first visit to Israel as president, the whole world, and especially the Middle East, paid attention. And as he took to lectern before a packed hall of students at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, the world watched. And they tweeted. They tweeted in Arabic, in Hebrew, in English, commenting in real-time and in dialogue, using Twitter for what it’s so well designed for. We saw a variety of tweets, like the ones below, that discussed... Read The Rest →

On the Meedan Radar – April 2013

Journalism & Tech - Meedan-translated post from the Witness blog (shared last bulletin) now published: فيديو المواطن للصحفيين: التحقق http://meedan.org/ar/2013/03/citizen_video - Two good references on the amazing work carried out by British amateur newshound Elliot Higgins aka @Brown_Moses who has made some important findings using YouTube videos to research weapons proliferation in Syria: Guardian report: How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room - BBC College of Journalism post on searching social media for news: It is a bit like playing the piano. On an average day... Read The Rest →

Meedan 2011 Annual Report

We are delighted to present the Meedan annual report for 2011, published today on Issuu. You can view this below, download or share. The report covers Meedan’s partnerships, technology development and programmatic focus through a year of tumultuous change in the Middle East. In presenting this report, we are grateful to the brilliant design work of Meedan Designer Maya Zankoul. We hope you enjoy it. Open publication – Free publishing – More arabic Share → Tweet

BBC Report on Arab Uprisings Calls for ‘Systematic’ Attribution for Citizen Footage

An internal BBC report on its coverage of the Arab uprisings this week revealed that three quarters of  reports containing citizen media failed to inform the audience about the source of that media. The report, authored by Edward Mortimer for the BBC Trust, said that journalists should use caveats or disclaimers to warn the audience that this video content – often mobile phone footage – came from particular activists on the ground. This striking, perhaps even alarming figure suggests that in the vast majority of reports on the Arab uprisings,... Read The Rest →

Six Steps for Fact Checking Citizen Media

Anyone can be a publisher today – thanks to the web. As a result, there are so many more sources of news and information, which makes fact checking all the more critical in fast moving news stories.  When disinformation gets into the news cycle, it can lead to people being put in harm’s way.  Here, then, is a set of six tips to help you get it right. 1. Who is the original source? Every piece of news has a source – the person who told you the news.  Who... Read The Rest →

Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Are you following the Arab spring through social media? Share your experiences

How can we better assess the credibility of citizen news reports online? What tools would help us to cross-reference and investigate citizen content? As part of a multi-year project with partners in Egypt and the United States, Meedan is supporting journalists to sort citizen media for credibility and accuracy. Here we ask you to help us understand the features we need to make this possible. Please fill in this 4-minute questionnaire, and if you want us to follow up with you for an interview, please give us a shout on... Read The Rest →

Meedan Developers head to Cambridge

As the sole London-based member of Meedan’s far flung team (we have developers in Damascus, Amman, San Francisco and Portland, not to mention our team of editors and translators across the Middle East), I was glad to have some company last week when some of my colleagues dropped in for a visit. The occasion was a two-day gathering at the University of Cambridge with the academic partners behind our inter-faith project. We are working on a multi-year project with the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme to develop cross-language approaches to inter-faith study... Read The Rest →

Lessons from ArabNet conference boost Middle East web startups

Nina Curley– The ArabNet conference in Beirut, Lebanon just wrapped up after a whirlwind two days, and Meedan was there to witness it all. Bigwigs gave newbies advice on startups and developing the right entrepreneurial mindset. Young bloggers tweeted cheeky comments and shifted the direction of on-stage conversation with their questions. Women represented in the crowd, even if not as much on the panels, and stood up for their voice. Palestinians were honored for their great entrepreneurial ideas despite being absent due to visa issues. The amazing Maya Zankoul produced fantastic... Read The Rest →

Crafting a moderation policy for cross-cultural dialogue online

What are the ingredients needed to craft an appropriate moderation policy for a cross-cultural forum? That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for some time.   In many ways, it’s a question we’ll need to be asking as long as this project exists. Meedan obviously brings together people of very different linguistic, cultural and religious backgrounds – which makes moderation challenging in two distinct respects. One, there are not obvious cultural norms we can draw on. And two, we are necessarily bringing together divergent viewpoints which are more likely... Read The Rest →

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