To content

Make imperceptible changes visible

DoCMA combines the expertise in media analysis of the Institute of Journalism with the data analysis and text mining skills in the faculties of Statistics and Computer Science. Henrik Müller holds the chair for "Economic Policy Journalism". Before his appointment at the TU Dortmund University, he was deputy editor-in-chief of the German business monthly "Manager Magazin". Jörg Rahnenführer holds the chair for “Statistical Methods in Genetics and Chemometry” at the Faculty of Statistics. He knows a lot about large amounts of data - but so far he was more familiar with numbers than letters. His colleague Carsten Jentsch holds the chair for "Business and Social Statistics". He is familiar with the analysis of political text data and joined the DoCMA team in 2018. Professor Erich Schubert, expert for data mining, joined in 2019.

The importance of text analysis with data mining rises. Just a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine what companies like Google could be able to do today thanks to increasing computing capacity and new algorithms: To process huge amounts of texts quickly and intelligently. However, the social sciences, economics and humanities have so far been reluctant to use big data-based methods. So there were only a few role models for Henrik Müller. But he was certain of his vision: Mass media in particular reacts extremely sensitively to changes in values or the balance of power in society and journalism itself is just as unaware of this as the public.