Photo: Tow Center held an orientation last week for the new Research Fellows. Photo courtesy Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Claire Wardle is research director for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. In January Knight Foundation announced $3 million in new support for Tow to fund innovative research and news experiments that explore the changing relationship of journalism and technology, while helping newsrooms and educators meet the information needs of communities.

Today is a very exciting day for us, as we’re announcing a new group of 31 Research Fellows.  The fellows are based around the world and will be researching a wide-range of projects at the cutting-edge of digital journalism.

The projects will be in four main research areas: Computation, Algorithms and Automated Journalism; Data, Impact and Metrics; Audiences and Engagement; and Experimental Journalism, Models and Practice.

We were recently awarded $3 million from Knight Foundation as part of a major initiative to expand innovation in newsrooms. This has allowed us to recruit for the first time a cohort of fellows who will undertake their research simultaneously. An open call in April resulted in a high number of quality research proposals, and now we’re excited about what this new cohort is going to produce as the fellows work alongside each other, either in the space we share with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the Columbia Journalism School, or virtually in our Slack channel.

One fellow, Meredith Broussard, an assistant professor at New York University, will be researching new ways to use artificial intelligence for investigative reporting, focusing on campaign finance data. Another fellow, Ph.D. candidate Alexandre Gonçalves, will be working to create a Web dashboard that allows journalists to analyze, visualize and interact with contractor data from the U.S. Department of Defense. In addition a group of five practitioners, artists and developers based in New York will create an independent wireless distribution platform for sharing locally focused media and journalism.

In addition to the more in-depth projects, six projects will be published as shorter guides to new methods and trends in journalism, including Automated Journalism, Crowdsourcing, Chatapps, Design and Journalism, Newsroom Encryption, Podcasting Business Models.

The chosen fellows include working journalists, Ph.D. candidates, and professors in disciplines as diverse as communications and architecture, media studies and computer science. Some projects will last just two months, some up to 16 months. Eighteen of the fellows are based in New York, but the researchers will work all over the world, including Los Angeles, Singapore, London and Melbourne, Australia.

Some of the fellows will present their work at Tow Center’s annual research conference on Nov. 12-13.  We’re also going to try something new. We have asked each fellow to “take over” the Tow Center Twitter account every week and publish updates about their work. So please follow us, so you can really get a sense of the full range of the research projects.

You can also read the full list of Tow Fellows and learn more about their research projects here.

Applications for the next round of fellowships beginning in both spring 2016 and fall 2016 are due Oct. 15, 2015. If you have any questions about the process, please get in touch with me.