In this project, we want to study how journalism uses digital data and algorithmic analyses to anticipate, draft, and evaluate future scenarios and developments. With that, we take a novel view on understanding the complex temporal orientations in journalistic practice and its products that sheds light on the largely unrecognized though essential aspect of modern time and its interrelation with modes of witnessing and knowing
To date, the mainstream of research in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences is either interested in the mnemonic function of journalism and its part in commemorating past events or it focusses on its role in tracking the most recent news. Little attention, however, is given to the journalistic outlook on the future and its entanglement of the tenses. Our project addresses this gap by conceptualizing and examining the prospective and projective dimension of journalism. It concentrates on data journalism as a recent field of communicative innovation that supports various types of engagement with the future.
In this project, I collaborate with Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I spent spring 2018 in Israel and visited Hebrew University’s Department of Communication and Journalism. The three year project also receives a grant from the Central Research Development Fund at Bremen University.