Berkman Buzz: February 21, 2013

The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects. To subscribe, click here.

New Media Cloud report on mapping the Trayvon Martin controversy

News coverage about the killing of Trayvon Martin started as a short-lived, local Florida news piece, but through strategic activation of traditional broadcast media and participatory online activism, eventually became the most-widely covered story about race in the last five years. The story drew immense coverage from professional journalists and active public engagement online and offline, offering a potent case study for examining the role and influence of participatory media on media agendas. To make this research possible, we’ve been building Media Cloud with colleagues at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It’s a toolset for rigorous, quantitative studies of media agendas and frames. Media Cloud collects stories from a corpus of more than 27,000 mainstream media and blog sources, and uses a link-following methodology to expand the corpus to other relevant sources.

From Erhardt Graeff's blog post for tha MIT Center for Civic Media, "Mapping the Trayvon Martin Media Controversy" About Media Cloud

RT @readmatter And our hottest trending story this week? "Is the Internet good or bad? Yes", by @zeynep: https://t.co/Wo6qWMeKje >—Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep)

Kate Darling interviewed by PBS on the future of robots in human society

As technology speeds forward, humans are beginning to imagine the day when robots will fill the roles promised to us in science fiction. But what should we be thinking about TODAY, as robots like military and delivery drones become a real part of our society? How should robots be programmed to interact with us? How should we treat robots? And who is responsible for a robot's actions? As we look at the unexpected impact of new technologies, we are obligated as a society to consider the moral and ethical implications of robotics.