Team members

Professor C.W. Anderson, University of Leeds, Principal Investigator (PI)

C.W. Anderson is a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and a member of the board of advisors for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of five books: Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press), Remaking the News (with Pablo Boczkowski, MIT Press), The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism (with Tamara Witschge, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida, SAGE), Journalism: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Len Downie and Michael Schudson, Oxford University Press), and Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt (Oxford University Press.)

Professor Helen Kennedy, University of Sheffield, Co-Investigator (Co-I)

Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Sheffield. Over 20+ years, she has researched how digital media developments are experienced by ‘ordinary people’ and how these experiences can inform the work of digital media practitioners in ways that address or overcome inequalities. She is a co-editor of Data Visualization in Society (with Martin Engebretsen, Amsterdam University Press) and the author of Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design (Palgrave) and Post, Mine, Repeat: Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary (Palgrave). She is interested in perceptions of and feelings about data processes and ‘datafication’ and related issues such as trust, injustice and what ‘good data’ might look like. She is also interested in the role of everyday visual representations of data and whether they can mobilise people to act.

Professor Giorgia Aiello, University of Leeds, Co-Investigator (Co-I)

Giorgia Aiello is Professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Leeds and Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna (Italy). She is a co-author of Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (with Katy Parry, SAGE) and was a recipient of the EU-FP7 Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant “Globalization, Visual Communication, Difference”. Her research focuses on the problems and potentials of visual communication in the construction of social, political and cultural identities in digital media, urban space, and everyday life. She is currently working on a book project about the significance of generic/stock images in contemporary culture and society.

Dr Arran Ridley, University of Leeds, Postdoctoral Researcher

Arran is a Research Fellow on this project. Previously he was a Research Associate in the Urban Complexity Lab (UCLAB) at the University for Applied Sciences Potsdam (Fachhochschule Potsdam) working on the project “Kollisionen: media collisions as drivers of innovation for new approaches to cultural heritage”. He was also a Research Assistant at the VisHub research lab at the School for Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has a PhD from the University of Leeds, an MA in Digital Media and Culture from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, and a BA in Animation from the University for the Creative Arts.