Guest Contributor
The University of Pennsylvania today announced $10 million in funding dedicated to its new Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy. The Center will be housed in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) and will operate in partnership with five other schools at Penn.
The Center will benefit from a five-year, $5 million investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as well as an additional $5 million in combined resources from Penn Engineering, Penn Arts & Sciences, the Annenberg School for Communication, the Wharton School, Penn Carey Law, and the School of Social Policy & Practice.
“There is a critical societal need to better understand—and respond to—the way media and information technologies mediate and even influence global conversations,” said J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s Interim President. “Championing truth and upholding democracy are important elements of Penn’s strategic framework, In Principle and Practice. We are uniquely positioned to lead on this great challenge through our accomplished faculty in AI and data science who work across disciplines. We are deeply grateful to the Knight Foundation for partnering with us on this critical endeavor.”
At the outset, the Center will propel research involving media, technology, and democracy within Penn. Once established, however, the hope is for the Center to become a global hub for researchers, private sector leaders, and for policymakers—by sharing research findings and creating near real-time dashboards that provide a clear view of the current media landscape, informed by empirical research. Over the long term, the Center also aims to serve as a central repository for data sharing with the broader research community.
“The University of Pennsylvania has the expertise and research capacity to study media and the information ecosystem holistically,” said Knight Foundation president and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth. “This new Center will encourage greater collaboration and create centralized resources to support scholarship and convenings across campus. It will also help establish Penn—and Philadelphia—as a leader in media, technology, and democracy.”
The Center’s primary mission will be to gather data into one repository and to facilitate research synergies across the fields of law, political science, media, communications, data science, AI, and more.
“The contemporary media ecosystem is comprised of a wide array of diverse producers, consumers, and content types. Understanding systems at this scale and complexity presents unprecedented challenges to methods and research design,” said Penn Provost John L. Jackson Jr. “This pioneering research center will develop new programs, support new opportunities, and coalesce many different data sets so that they are available for others to use. In these ways, it will vividly reaffirm Penn’s leadership in the interconnected study of global media, technology, and democracy.”
The Center will operate around four programmatic pillars, including an annual flagship conference for media leaders industry-wide, an internal grants program to support research among Penn faculty and students, a research infrastructure to facilitate data sharing and collaboration, and a cohort of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.
This story was written by Ron Ozio. To read the full article, please visit Penn Today.