Back to results

Virginia Tech

Supporting Open Source Investigative Journalism with Crowdsourced Image Geolocation

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Journalists rely on image and video verification to support their investigations and often utilize open source tools to verify user generated content, but current practice requires experts be involved in every step of the process. Additionally, lacking custom tools to support verification efforts, experts are often limited to the utility of existing, openly available tools, which may or may not support the interactions and information gathering they require. We aim to support the process of geolocating images and videos through crowdsourcing. By enabling crowd workers to participate in the geolocation process, we can provide investigative journalists with efficient and complete verification of image locations. Parallelizing searching speeds up the verification process as well as provides a more extensive search, all while allowing the expert to follow up on other leads or investigative work. We produced a software prototype called GroundTruth which enables crowd workers to support investigative journalists in the geolocation of visual media quickly and accurately. Additionally, this work contributes experimental results demonstrating how the crowd can be utilized to support complex sensemaking tasks.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science and Applications
Department dc:contributor.department
Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Kohler, Rachel
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Luther, Kurt
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • North, Christopher L.
  • Horning, Michael A.

Subjects

dc:subject × 6

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:11281
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78697

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Kohler, Rachel. Supporting Open Source Investigative Journalism with Crowdsourced Image Geolocation. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78697