Crowdsourcing translation during crisis situations: are ‘real voices’ being excluded from the decisions and policies it supports?

by Gwyneth Sutherlin 07/05/2013

If you have ever worried about media bias then you should really worry about the impact of translation.

by Gwyneth Sutherlin 07/05/2013

As revolution spread across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, participants and observers of the events were keen to engage via social media. However, saturation by Arab-language content demanded a new translation strategy for those outside the region to follow the information flows—and for those inside to reach beyond their domestic audience. Crowdsourcing was seen as the most efficient strategy in terms of cost and time to meet the demand, and translation applications that harnessed volunteers across the internet were integrated with nearly every type of ICT project. For example, as Steve Stottlemyre has already mentioned on this blog, translation played a part in tools like the Libya Crisis Map, and was essential for harnessing tweets from the region’s ‘voices on the ground.’ If you have ever worried about media bias then you should really worry about the impact of translation. Before the revolutions, the translation software for Egyptian Arabic was almost non-existent. Few translation applications were able to handle the different Arabic dialects or supply coding labor and capital to build something that could contend with internet blackouts. Google’s Speak to Tweet became the dominant application used in the Egyptian uprisings, delivering one homogenised source of information that fed the other sources. In 2011, this collaboration helped circumvent the problem of Internet connectivity in Egypt by allowing cellphone users to call their tweet into a voicemail to be transcribed and translated. A crowd of volunteers working for Twitter enhanced translation of Egyptian Arabic after the Tweets were first transcribed by a Mechanical Turk application trained from an initial 10 hours of speech. The unintended consequence of these crowdsourcing applications was that when the material crossed the language barrier into English, it often became inaccessible to the original contributors. Individuals on the ground essentially ceded authorship to crowds of untrained volunteer translators who stripped the information of context, and then plotted it in categories and on maps without feedback from…

Collective Action, Ethics, Mapping, Politics & Government

Did Libyan crisis mapping create usable military intelligence?

by Steve Stottlemyre 14/03/2013

While many people continued to contribute conventional humanitarian information to the map, the sudden shift toward information that could aid international military intervention was unmistakable.

by Steve Stottlemyre 14/03/2013

The Middle East has recently witnessed a series of popular uprisings against autocratic rulers. In mid-January 2011, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled his country, and just four weeks later, protesters overthrew the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Yemen’s government was also overthrown in 2011, and Morocco, Jordan, and Oman saw significant governmental reforms leading, if only modestly, toward the implementation of additional civil liberties. Protesters in Libya called for their own ‘day of rage’ on February 17, 2011, marked by violent protests in several major cities, including the capitol Tripoli. As they transformed from ‘protestors’ to ‘Opposition forces’ they began pushing information onto Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, reporting their firsthand experiences of what had turned into a civil war virtually overnight. The evolving humanitarian crisis prompted the United Nations to request the creation of the Libya Crisis Map, which was made public on March 6, 2011. Other, more focused crisis maps followed, and were widely distributed on Twitter. While the map was initially populated with humanitarian information pulled from the media and online social networks, as the imposition of an internationally enforced No Fly Zone (NFZ) over Libya became imminent, information began to appear on it that appeared to be of a tactical military nature. While many people continued to contribute conventional humanitarian information to the map, the sudden shift toward information that could aid international military intervention was unmistakable. How useful was this information, though? Agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community convert raw data into useable information (incorporated into finished intelligence) by utilising some form of the Intelligence Process. As outlined in the U.S. military’s joint intelligence manual, this consists of six interrelated steps all centred on a specific mission. It is interesting that many Twitter users, though perhaps unaware of the intelligence process, replicated each step during the Libyan civil war; producing finished intelligence adequate for consumption by NATO commanders and rebel leadership. It…

Collective Action, Governance & Security, Publications

Papers on Policy, Activism, Government and Representation: New Issue of Policy and Internet

by David Sutcliffe 16/01/2013

Investigating the relationship between Internet-based applications and data and the policy process.

by David Sutcliffe 16/01/2013

We are pleased to present the combined third and fourth issue of Volume 4 of Policy and Internet. It contains eleven articles, each of which investigates the relationship between Internet-based applications and data and the policy process. The papers have been grouped into the broad themes of policy, government, representation, and activism. POLICY: In December 2011, the European Parliament Directive on Combating the Sexual Abuse, Sexual Exploitation of Children and Child Pornography was adopted. The directive’s much-debated Article 25 requires Member States to ensure the prompt removal of child pornography websites hosted in their territory and to endeavor to obtain the removal of such websites hosted outside their territory. Member States are also given the option to block access to such websites to users within their territory. Both these policy choices have been highly controversial and much debated; Karel Demeyer, Eva Lievens, and Jos Dumortie analyse the technical and legal means of blocking and removing illegal child sexual content from the Internet, clarifying the advantages and drawbacks of the various policy options. Another issue of jurisdiction surrounds government use of cloud services. While cloud services promise to render government service delivery more effective and efficient, they are also potentially stateless, triggering government concern over data sovereignty. Kristina Irion explores these issues, tracing the evolution of individual national strategies and international policy on data sovereignty. She concludes that data sovereignty presents national governments with a legal risk that can’t be addressed through technology or contractual arrangements alone, and recommends that governments retain sovereignty over their information. While the Internet allows unprecedented freedom of expression, it also facilitates anonymity and facelessness, increasing the possibility of damage caused by harmful online behaviour, including online bullying. Myoung-Jin Lee, Yu Jung Choi, and Setbyol Choi investigate the discourse surrounding the introduction of the Korean Government’s “Verification of Identity” policy, which aimed to foster a more responsible Internet culture by mandating registration of a user’s real…