Bauhaus-Universität Weimar: Personnel matter

In future, the faculty wishes to strengthen the ties between its three departments for media studies, computer science and media management and, among other measures, has resolved to support young research talents. Three new interdisciplinary junior professorships are being established with funding from the joint tenure track programme of the German federal and state governments and the Thuringian state programme to support digitalisation in higher education. These will at the same time offer an attractive, plannable and transparent path to a full professorship.

»The term ›digitalisation‹ is insufficient on numerous fronts. That being said, it nonetheless points to a current development that cuts across all areas of society,« says Prof. Dr. Henning Schmidgen, Dean of the Faculty of Media at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. »We wish to address this issue, hence we’ve established three new junior professorships to research cutting-edge digital topics and introduce them into teaching.«

Junior professorship in »Digital Cultures«
Affiliated with the Department of Media Studies, the junior professorship in »Digital Cultures« will in future forge closer links between the Department of Media Studies and the Department of Computer Science. Dr Sabine Wirth, who has held the junior professorship since the start of the 2022 summer semester, focuses on changes in media and everyday culture due to digital technologies. By exploring the history and theory of personal computing and its evolution into mobile computing as well as forms of ubiquitous computing (i.e. the omnipresence of computers), the professorship above all pursues the question of how algorithmic processes link to human practices at, with and through interfaces and thereby yield new media aesthetics. The professorship moreover aims to collaborate with the Department of Media Informatics on further development of the spectrum of methods applied in media studies and to test and critically reflect on the use of digital research tools.

Junior professorship in »Digital Economies«
The new junior professorship in »Digital Economies« forms the interface between the Department of Media Management and the Department of Computer Science. It examines the economic effects and implications of digital platforms and digital business models. Junior Professor Dr Jürgen Rösch also joined the Faculty of Media on 1 April 2022. His research focuses on the study of network effects, the data economy and the behaviour of market participants in a digitalised world. The junior professorship has set itself the goal of drawing on practice-oriented research and teaching to identify opportunities at the interface to the web and to thus contribute to the active design of such markets.

Junior professorship in »Computational Social Science«
A third tenure-track professorship, affiliated with the Department of Media Informatics, will be dedicated to the potential, dangers and effects of large data sets and algorithms on human behaviour. The professorship currently being advertised should among others research the influence of social media on opinion formation. Network models, simulation methods and psycholinguistic procedures will be applied to this end, whereby large quantities of text, audio, location and movement data will be evaluated.

From June 2022, teaching within the Faculty of Media will also be strengthened by the newly established lectureship in »Society and Digitalisation«. It will offer a broad range of courses on the cultural and social but also the environmental effects of the spread of digital media technologies as well as support the planned establishment of a Humanities Centre for Digital Transformation.

The professorships in »Digital Cultures« and »Digital Economics« are just two of the total of eight additional junior professorships being funded at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar by the joint tenure track programme of the German federal and state governments. The junior professorship for »Computational Social Science« is being funded by the Thuringian state programme to support digitalisation in higher education to support digitalisation in higher education.

For more information on the tenure track programme, see:
www.uni-weimar.de/en/university/research-and-art/young-researchers/postdoc/tenure-track-professorship

In case of questions, please contact Tina Meinhardt (Press and Public Relations for the Faculty of Media) via email (presse[at]medien.uni-weimar.de) or by telephone (+49 (0) 36 43/58 37 65).