The main problem the ROADMAP project tries to address is the lack of an agreed upon understanding on how rare disease nonprofit organizations can best pursue or support drug repurposing. Though there have been notable examples of rare disease nonprofit organizations that have helped to shepherd and garner resources for drug repurposing opportunities in the US, there are various information-based challenges that they face. One of these challenges is simply how to navigate the process of drug repurposing, including overcoming various types of hurdles such as policy, legal, funding, etc. This information is not centralized or widely available to share between the stakeholders, and no resources exist to help stakeholders navigate the drug repurposing landscape.
Recent research on conspiracy theories labels conspiracism as a distinct and deficient epistemic process. However, the tendency to pathologize conspiracism obscures the fact that it is a diverse and dynamic collective sensemaking process, transacted in public on the web. Here, we adopt a narrative framework to introduce a new analytical approach for examining online conspiracism. Narrative plays an important role because it is central to human cognition as well as being domain agnostic, and so can serve as a bridge between conspiracism and other modes of knowledge production.
We all know that journalists are called upon to inform the public of the new and important things of the day, whether it is events around the world or the newest medical breakthrough. But, as everything has moved online and become an open space for the public to participate in, journalists are no longer solely in charge of this space. Though this change opened up the great opportunity for everyone to be "journalists" in the way that they can post information for others to see, unfortunately, this has also helped give rise to the creation and dissemination of misinformation, or "fake news".
Despite many advancements in medicine and overall cancer death rates steadily declining, every day we see more and more news about things that cause or prevent cancer. Some studies have shown that this overexposure to cancer-related news can create fatalistic perceptions. In other words, the perception that "everything causes cancer". This notion is only incorrect in itself, but also causes a variety of other related issues. If everything causes cancer, then leading a healthy lifestyle, giving up harmful habits or going for regular check ups seems like a waste of time. The question arises: where are these fatalistic perceptions of reality coming from? This study was designed to test one possible answer to this question: whether traditional and online newspapers are a contributing factor to these perceptions.
We live in an age when there is unprecedented access to information through the Internet. Though this provides the ability for the world to become more connected, educated and informed on global news, the downside is that information online constantly changes, and the pace and extent of this change is not something the general population is aware of. As information changes, facts are often distorted through oversimplification and exaggeration to attract readership, leading to the creation and spread of misinformation. In this project, I aimed to explore how this process takes place through analyzing the life cycle of a specific academic article.
Fake news and misinformation is one of the most salient problems of our time. In the future, I hope to add to the growing literature on this subject by replicating this type of network analysis study on a greater scale. This would enable me to make conclusions about the general trends of how information spreads throughout the media, and continue to trace the life cycle of science information and, even more importantly, misinformation, back to its sources.
Since the news media environment went digital, outlets now have the ability to update online content continuously, removing and editing information without any oversight. This breaks the information flow process: news stories no longer represent “a snapshot in time” but instead living, “mutating” organisms. It also enables the creation and spread of misinformation. The type of changes being made are not yet known or widely researched. To better understand this issue, I conducted a textual analysis of 100 diffengine images, as well as thirteen in-depth case studies on the NewsDiffs website, focusing on content changes at the New York Times website. Through my analysis, I have found three overarching themes: “developing story”, “change in tone”, and “correcting inaccuracy”.
By identifying these themes, I hope to shed light on this vital, yet largely unknown complication in the process of information dissemination within the greater media network.