“Incubatore di Senso” is an online platform that uncovers gender biases in news reporting by employing both natural language processing and traditional investigating techniques.
The first case study follows the case of Silvia Romano, an Italian cooperant in Kenya, who was kidnapped by the terrorist organisation al Shabaab and released in May 2020 after 18 months of captivity. Preliminary results obtained through a trends study and an analysis of a limited number of publications, have already shown how her story was reported with sexist and islamophobic language.
The results of my investigation will be shared in the form of an online journalistic piece supported by data visualisations on Futuress.
In the process of creating the first case study I am documenting the research and technical process in order to develop an open source framework and toolset for fellow researchers.
By further expanding on other case studies with the same methodology, I want to speak to international audiences about weaponization of language, body politics and systemic gender biases in the context of rising populisms and manipulation of information.
The project is led by me, Elena Falomo, with consultations from Noemi Masoero, a sociologist, expert in open source investigations and Roman Miletitch, an artificial intelligence researcher.