'So they can see all we’ve suffered!' : understanding the roles of the citizen witness in the visual economy of crisis images

This project examines the various roles of mobile-clad citizen witnesses of crisis as well as how their produced content is used in the news, based on a critical discourse analysis of 140 tweets shared during the first week of Nicaragua’s current socio-political crisis. This corpus was developed through data cleaning to include only those shared by news organizations that showcased citizen visuals. The analysis showed that citizen witnesses enacted four distinguishable roles: that of verifier, watchdog, unifier, and dissenter, and that news organizations tended to incorporate citizen content through re-tweeting with no added context