wanshu Zhang
Doctoral researcher at the C²DH
Wanshu works on the project ‘REPETITION PATTERNS AND EPHEMERAL EFFECTS OF RUMORS IN SOCIAL MEDIA (COLLECTIVE AMNESIA PHENOMENON)‘ under the supervision of Florentina Armaselu
When you search for papers related to rumour detection, even if you limit the time to the past five years or even one year, you will get an ocean of literature. A large number of articles talk about how to detect rumours on the Internet and compete in assessing whose model is more accurate and efficient. However, are rumours characteristic to the Internet? Rumour seems to represent a historical topic, and in the last century scholars’ definition of it was still based on word-of-mouth and field surveys, such as the book Rumour of Orléans written by Edgar Morin in 1971.
With the development of the Internet and “self-media”, texts, images and videos are regarded as potential carriers of rumours. Can we go back in time and use modern machine learning models to detect rumours in historical data such as digitised newspapers? Compared with the rumours in social media platforms like X (Twitter), Facebook, what are the differences in rumour spreading patterns and influencing factors in historical materials? Can we study the phenomenon of collective amnesia by analysing the recurrence of rumours over time? These are some of the questions that triggered my interest and led to my research topic.