Lab

The Multimedia and Authorship degree program sees itself as a laboratory for science and digital journalism. In different formats and projects, we bring together a variety of scientific disciplines as well as media and cultural organizations in order to explore relevant questions of the present in a scientific and praxis-oriented way. As a university master’s program, we enjoy the freedom to take risks.

Our course content lives from the students’ commitment and desired topics as well as the questions and ideas of our partners from the fields of science, journalism, culture and the creative industries. We are open to cooperation and also individuals and media projects looking for a professional experimental field or collaboration. This also includes interdisciplinary approaches in teaching, such as in the SoundWork(s) seminar, where we experimentally explored the sounds of work together with students of music, media and communication studies and ethnology.

We actively and self-critically explore our own diversity and questions of representation and discrimination in scientific and journalistic production. We also intend to subject unpleasant or previously ignored topics to both scientific and journalistic examination. A selection of our projects in recent years can be found here.

Digital Talks

The Digital Talks conversational and workshop format brings journalists and scientists together in an academic environment and thus stimulates interdisciplinary exchange between the fields of research and journalism. Thus, we inspire scientific and practical media work at our Department of Media and Communication Studies.

One of the guests was author and producer Frédéric Dubois. He presented his interactive documentary film project Field Trip about Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin. Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht Data School), Natalie Widmann (ida, now SWR Datalab) and Martin Paul (MDR) discussed Automated News Projects. Journalists Juli Katz and Alexander Fanta, media scientists Christopher Buschow, Orit Halpern, Sebastian Sevignani, Maria Eriksson and Pelle Snickers as well as author Tung-Hui Hu have also been guests.

Since 2021, we have been exploring in depth the question of how crimes against humanity challenge journalists and media professionals. To this end, we met with the Russian exiled journalists Sonya Groysman (TV Rain), Ekaterina Martynova (DOXA) and Dmitriy Shvet (Mediazona) as well as the author and journalist Melina Borčak, who takes a critical look at genocides and reporting on them.

The Digital Talks format, initiated by Patrick Vonderau and Maren Schuster, produced exchange on cross-cutting issues such as digital methods and representation. Further information can be found on the website of the Department of Media and Communication Studies.

Studierende schreiben

We work together with various media on a project basis. MMA students and journalists from the online editorial department of MDR Sachsen-Anhalt have worked and published on sensors and fine dust as part of a Citizens Science project organised by the Fraunhofer Institute. Media such as Vice, @nachhaltig.kritisch, Der Spiegel, Die Deutsche Welle and Netzwerk Klimajournalismus have supported individual journalistic projects, while students work on and publish local science, campus, climate and cultural topics in recurring projects for Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Kulturfalter and MDR Sachsen-Anhalt. During a ”Reporter:innentag”, students get to know the day-to-day work of an editorial office.

Beyond Journalism?

We combine journalistic practices with scientific, artistic and other communicative working methods and test media action with different focal points and objectives. In film screenings, speed labs and discussion formats such as with Karamba Diaby, we bring our projects such as Hallegestalten, FacingTheFuture, Diagnose: Unsichtbar, Stolpersteine-Filme gegen das Vergessen as well as various climate journalism formats closer to the people of Halle. Sometimes topics covered in seminars are also transferred to cultural projects and exhibitions: for example, a sound-based exhibit was created for the 2017 Radiorevolten or the “Hasstelefon” for the Streit, Zoff und Beef exhibition at the Stadtmuseum Halle. Audio productions and memes were at the centre of a discussion for the GfM annual conference on the topic of #arbeit

Stadtklima Halle - experiencing climate journalism through augmented reality (AR)

Stadtklima Halle is an augmented reality project of the Stadtmuseum Halle, funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, which focusses on the climate-friendly city of the future and the people who are committed to climate protection in Halle. MMA employees were responsible for initiating, applying for and directing the project.The students conducted user interviews on climate and the climate debate in various neighbourhoods for the project, prepared a social space analysis for the Hallmarkt and supported the prototyping of the exhibits. They also worked together with the interdisciplinary Stadtklima Halle project team. The results and research were then incorporated into the two AR exhibitions Hallmarkt der Zukunft and the Wir-Sind-Laut-Tour, as well as the journalistic formats Gemeinsame Sache on Twitter, the Instagram channel Stadtklima, the report Hitzig and the storytelling format Grüne Generationen. The portraits of the Grüne Generationen have become part of the Wir-Sind-Laut-Tour and have inspired a series of articles on the dialogue between the generations on MDR Sachsen-Anhalt Online. The Netzwerk Klimajournalismus and Tim Klimes from Deutsche Welle supported the students’ journalistic project phase. In the run-up to the project, the students benefited from a design thinking workshop (Gerlow+Kühl) and the design expertise of the agency Prefrontal Cortex, which was commissioned to create augmented reality exhibits for Stadtklima Halle.

Stadtklima Halle was developed as part of “dive in. Programme for Digital Interactions” of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) in the NEUSTART KULTUR programme.

Diagnosis: Invisible, medicine and media-transfer project

Diagnosis: Invisible (“Diagnose: Unsichtbar”) is a journalistic project that examines the impact of social inequality on health. The 2019-2021 master’s class worked with medical students to develop formats that deal with themes involving social medicine.

The physicians shared their expertise with our students, and together they converted scientific jargon into language more accessible to the target groups. Thus, it could be guaranteed that the symptoms, preventative measures and problems are easier to understand while still described correctly.

For the doctors, this offered the opportunity to consider medicine in terms of society as a whole and develop new ways and ideas of how to deal with social medicine and communicate their knowledge to a general public. Their work can benefit from experiences from this project. In addition, a network of physicians and journalists formed, which may be used for other projects.

As a result, the podcast Unbehandelt, the social-medicine newsletter Upstream, the multimedia long-form essay Von ungleichen (T)Räumen and the journalistic Instagram project @bittere.pille were all created.

Maren Schuster was responsible for the project’s concept and journalism. Amand Führer, researcher at the MLU’s Institute of Epidemiology, Biometry and Computer Science, supported the project professionally as a physician and with his network. Inputs of scientists and journalists to podcasting, journalism at Instagram and data journalism accompanied the project Diagnosis: Invisible in the implementation phase.

The transfer project was also supported by the Transfer- und Gründerservice of the MLU. Among other things, they financed the development phase of a design-thinking workshop by Jonas Kirel, Franziska Gerlow and Paul Schweidler from Gerlow+Kühl. In addition, Diagnosis: Invisible was supported by the international media network Are We Europe, so that a part of the project was implemented in English with a European and cross-border journalist perspective.

Particulate Matter: Sensor journalism, bots and citizens science

The theme of particulate matter convinced us because it is scientifically and journalistically challenging. For the Multimedia and Authorship master’s program, it was an entry into science journalism, and at the same time, we wanted to test with MDR Saxony-Anhalt Online to what extent sensor data can be used in journalism and is interesting for the audience.

Professionally, TROPOS of the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research provided support. The Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure of Materials and Systems made sensor technology available for the citizens-science project Surveying the World 2.0, which was then explained by their employees and Eigenbaukombinat.

Inputs on data and sensor journalism, AI and bot technology, and a workshop on science journalism were the starting point to find out through design thinking with all involved researchers and students which journalistic approaches and formats are sustainable.

The result is a Scrollytelling format about fine-dust measurement with bees at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a self-experiment using a fine-dust kit and interactive card, as well as the Twitter bot Dustin Air. Dustin Air responds to keywords such as barbecue or printer and provides entertaining facts about air-pollution potential. Twitter has turned off Dustin, but his answers and all projects are published at MDR Saxony-Anhalt Online.

Media and new rights

At the request of the students, we have been intensively dealing with the new right-wing for years. As an institute that researches media effects and the media producers of tomorrow, we believe we have a special responsibility to analyze how right-wing radicals and extremists exploit the media and media attention.

What’s up? The new right-wing in the focus of journalism, science and civil society

In September 2018, lecturers and students in our department, journalists, scientists of various disciplines and civil-society and cultural actors from Central Germany, Berlin and Vienna accepted our invitation to exchange views concerning media representation of the new right-wing.

Together with our lecturers Maren Schuster and Claudia Böttcher, a historian and media scientist, students in the seminar Media and the New Right-wing designed and realized the workshop meeting of the same name. At the same time, we interviewed for our seminars on media praxis people who deal with the topic scientifically, artistically or politically and worked on visual strategies for dealing with the new right-wing in journalism.

What is it? Scientific investigations of the new rights

All students of the Multimedia and Authorship master’s program received the chance to participate in a winter school on communication patterns of radicalization. A Viennese research group explained its methodology for research of radicalization processes in social media and at the same time conducted a media-usage experiment with students on the audiovisual representation of link-wing and right-wing violence.

This gave our students ideas for their own research practice. The research work from Vienna led to several master’s theses, one of which examined deplatforming of the identitarian movement and their migration from social media to Telegram groups.

It is something! Journalistic reflections about the new right-wing

How do journalists deal with representatives of the new right-wing? Where is the border between necessary reporting, and where does the podium begin for inhuman ideologies? This and other questions are dedicated to the booklet IST WAS? Medien und Journalismus in Zeiten der Neuen Rechten. This is an interdisciplinary study project that Gitte Kießling and Maren Schuster as senior lecturers of Multimedia and Authorship have realized together with students and in cooperation with the graphic designer Andine Müller of the University of Media, Communication and Business Berlin.

The booklet’s media activities also reflect the issues mentioned above and explore the boundaries between scientific, journalistic and artistic approaches. It was published by Vistas Verlag with the support of the Network Research e. V..