EAGER: SaTC: Early-Stage Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Designing Trustworthy and Transparent Information Platforms

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Defined as openness to the information creation and reporting process, transparency is a way for information institutions that have an online presence to reconnect with citizens and establish their legitimacy. This research will conduct a series of design investigations to illuminate the critical new phenomenon of transparency to rebuild public trust in one such information institution--journalistic organizations. Marrying mass communications research with human-centered computing, this research will take a novel interdisciplinary approach to answer the following questions. How can online information platforms effectively embrace the ideal of transparency as a means to increase trust? How can news organizations effectively demonstrate to the public the primary features that make a story trustworthy and the core aspects that govern the production and reporting of a news story? The research will be conducted along three phases. The first involves understanding the current practices of online news production and consumption with respect to trustworthiness. Phase 1 will result in a rich description of what constitutes trustworthy information online and inform the development of a brand new, transformative class of transparency artifacts. In the second phase, this project will appropriate theories from Communications research and combine with data mining and natural language-based techniques from the Computing field, to build transparency features highlighting key aspects of news reporting. Specifically, it will explore two classes of transparency tools: disclosure and participatory. Disclosure transparency will communicate the production, framing, and journalistic standards around news reports. Participatory transparency will aim at getting users involved in the news cycle through two channel-based interactive features: commenting capability and hovering to see additional information. Finally, phase 3 includes interface evaluations via experiments followed by participatory design workshops with the two primary stakeholders of an online news system--journalists and news readers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.