Curating images from the protests in Turkey via journalists on the ground

With such an avalanche of images circulating across social media platforms, curating a gallery of pictures which can be trusted for their authenticity during times of intense activity is now much more difficult than it was in the early days of social media.

The coverage of last weekend’s protests in Istanbul, for instance, included many RTs of images of hundreds of people making their way across the iconic Bosphorus bridge  - leaving twitter users unable to tell the difference between an ongoing protest and the coverage of an earlier marathon.

If you’re working outside of a large news company without access to specialised services such as Storyful or Blottr, you’re faced with two broad approaches to dealing with this dilemma.
1. Put the work in yourself to verify the credibility of the image using some of the many free tools available (eg. Exif data, background checks on those users submitting, checking any location tags etc.) no problem if you’ve the time and the knowledge to do that work.
2. Only use content from trusted sources to cut down on the potential for errant postings – and this is the way the gallery above has been compiled.

The images on this page are a small selection compiled from a few of the journalists I worked with in Istanbul earlier this year who I know strive for accuracy in their journalism. The embeddable gallery uses  twitpics tweeted by;

Pinar Dag – you can see her work on this website http://pinardag.com/pd or follow her on Twitter @pinardag.

Ahmet Yılmaz Vural - see his work at http://ahmetyilmazvural.com/blog @ahmetyv

mehves evin – see her work here http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com or follow on Twitter @mehvesevin

If you’d like to use the gallery on a website or blog, the embed code can be found here at HashGordon.com using the search term  ’n0ticeTurkey’. Please notice I have added an extra level of moderation to prevent spamming which means only images I have personally ‘n0ticed’ will appear in the gallery.

The tools used to create it are all available for free as part of the open journalism toolkit here at n0tice.org and demonstrates a form of collaborative journalism that can be carried out with contacts or invited contributors; via a ‘call out’ to an audience of existing users or by harnessing the efforts of multiple bloggers and journalists if you work in a newsroom.

There’s more information about setting up these social picture galleries here.