Data Infrastructure

The Penn Center on Media, Technology and Democracy is committed to expanding access to essential datasets for computational social science, enabling a better understanding of the key challenges facing the information ecosystem.

To this end, the Center supports the Penn Media Accountability Project (PennMAP) – an interdisciplinary, nonpartisan research project of Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab, dedicated to enhancing media transparency and accountability at the scale of the entire information ecosystem.

PennMAP is building technology to detect patterns of bias and misinformation in media from across the political spectrum and spanning television, radio, social media, and the broader web. PennMAP also tracks consumption of information via television, desktop computers, and mobile devices, as well as its effects on individual and collective beliefs and understanding.

In collaboration with its data partners, PennMAP is also building a scalable data infrastructure to ingest, process, and analyze tens of terabytes of television, radio, and web content, as well as representative panels of roughly 100,000 media consumers over several years.

Below, you can see several of the research projects driven by PennMAP data.