MADISON – Through a $1 million Knight Foundation grant, researchers at the UW-Madison journalism school will establish the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal.
The grant will support an ongoing study of Wisconsin’s state and regional communications systems. The study, which started in 2010, looks at how state and regional information can contribute to, or improve, polarization.
The funding will allow the center to expand its research beyond Wisconsin and compare it to other political battleground states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. It also is part of a broader Knight Foundation effort to better understand how technology is transforming our democracy and how we receive and engage with information.
“Understanding how we move beyond polarized politics and toward civic renewal is a large-scale effort that requires detailed and extended study of the communication ecology and its social consequences using a range of approaches,” said Dhavan Shah, who will lead the computational efforts.
Leadership in the new center will be drawn from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication as well as the departments of political science, statistics and electrical and computer engineering. Among the UW professors involved in the project are Shah, Lew Friedland, Mike Wagner, Katherine Cramer, Karl Rohe and William Sethares.
