University of Pennsylvania Launches Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy

The Center will bring together six schools at Penn with $10 million in support from Knight Foundation and the University

Originally published in
PENN TODAY

September 5, 2024

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.

Christopher S. Yoo, Imasogie Professor in Law and Technology at Penn Carey Law, and Duncan Watts, Stevens University Professor and a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, are the the grant’s two principal investigators.

“One of the Center’s primary goals is to promote empirical research into digital media’s impact on democracy,” said Christopher S. Yoo, Imasogie Professor in Law and Technology at Penn Carey Law, with secondary appointments in SEAS and Annenberg. “Without sound, evidence-based insights into what is really going on, arguments risk devolving into polarized positions, which in turn can lead to a breakdown of trust in media and institutions and our shared commitment to democratic processes. The health of our society depends on finding ways to prevent that from happening.”

Professors Yoo and Duncan Watts, the grant’s two principal investigators, are trusted partners in industry and academia.

Yoo is the founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition at Penn Carey Law. His work focuses on normative issues in legal policy. Watts, founding director of Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab, is an empirical scholar whose research is marked by innovation. He is also the Stevens University Professor and a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in Penn Engineering, Annenberg, and Wharton, where he is also the inaugural Rowan Fellow. Together, Yoo and Watts offer synergies between policymakers and leaders in media and technology.

“The United States and other countries around the world are living through a series of crises associated with a high level of affective polarization and diminishing trust in institutions. Increasingly, we are finding ourselves in different universes in terms of what we understand about the world,” said Watts. “But public discourse is limited to simplistic explanations of what’s happening. Social media has a lot of data, but it is hard to get.

“Our approach will utilize a combination of AI methods applied to large data sets and behavioral experiments to uncover the prevalence, causes, and consequences of misinformation and bias. These empirical insights will inform our legal and policy work that is dedicated to identifying system solutions that benefit society.”

The Penn Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy will be housed in one of Penn’s newest buildings, Amy Gutmann Hall, a hub for cross-disciplinary collaborations that harness research and data across Penn’s 12 Schools, located at 34th and Chestnut Streets. The search for an executive director for the Center is underway, along with other staff to manage operations, communications, and the Penn-wide research network.

“The timing is obvious, and the need is obvious. We are committed to bringing together many disparate data sources that are hard to get and organizing and analyzing them so that those resources are available for everyone to use,” said Yoo.