School of Information Studies (iSchool) Associate Professor Jenny Stromer-Galley has been named a research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Journalism School.
Jennifer Stromer-Galley
Stromer-Galley, along with eight other Knight News Innovation Fellows from industry and academia, including The New York Times, “This American Life,” Yale and Rutgers will work on a wide range of subjects, ranging from virtual reality to the use of machine learning in newsrooms.
Funding for the fellowship projects comes from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, adding to the Tow Center’s existing research efforts in journalism and technology connections.
Stromer-Galley’s research work as a fellow will center around her “Illuminating 2016” project, an effort to provide helpful information to political journalists about what candidates and the public are saying on social media about the current presidential election.
“With the support and community that the Tow Fellowship provides, my ‘Illuminating 2016’ project will be able to help journalists better cover the presidential candidates,” she explains. “Now that social media is such a key part of campaigns, I hope we can help journalists increase transparency, and give the public the information they need to make an informed decision.”
The Tow Fellows will work on six projects across four areas: Audiences & Engagement, Computational Journalism, Impact & Metrics and Experimental Journalism. The Tow Center welcomed the fellows for an orientation earlier this month, and they will join more than 25 existing fellows who are working on 13 continuing research projects.
“The fellows bring extraordinary expertise to the program,” says Shazna Nessa, journalism director at the Knight Foundation. “The hope is that they will provide rich explorations around pressing questions and ideas that are important for both working journalists and students, as well as people in related fields who are passionate about news and information.”
At the iSchool, Stromer-Galley’s research focuses on human interaction with and through digital technologies. Her work explores why people talk politics online, what practical addition deliberation can bring to e-government and the development of a coding scheme to assess the qualities of political discussion.
Her award-winning book “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford University Press) provides a history of presidential campaigns as they have adopted and adapted to emerging digital communication technologies.
In addition, Stromer-Galley serves as director for the iSchool’s Center for Computational and Data Sciences, and is an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Political Science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Vice President of the Association of Internet Researchers.
