Christian Pentzold

Leipzig University · Department of Communication and Media Studies

This article explores a way to reconstruct the verbally and visually constituted frames used in the coverage of the trial of John/Ivan Demjanjuk, a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen accused of holocaustrelated war crimes. The study looks at an exemplary case of current multimodal discourse, in which written messages and images from broadcasts and press, as...

Der Artikel diskutiert den Beitrag der Praxistheorien für die kulturalistische Kommunikations- und Medienforschung. Ausgehend von sozialphilosophischen und kultursoziologischen Vorhaben, ein praxistheoretisches Paradigma zu etablieren, werden erstens dessen Basisannahmen entlang der Prinzipien Rekursivität und Relationalität erläutert. Zweitens wer...

We develop an integrative conceptual framework and research agenda for studying epistemic authorities in the digital age. Consulting epistemic authorities (e.g., professional experts, well-informed laypeople, technologies) can be an efficient fast-track to knowledge. To fulfill this functional role, those who claim epistemic authority need to be bo...

Across Europe, the public sector is expanding its efforts to introduce data-driven decision-support and intelligent systems in the administration of welfare. The growing body of research that highlights the impact and harms these systems have on citizens’ lives, raises questions about the guiding ideas, values, and norms that are at the heart of cu...

Automation is a defining feature of today’s societies—not only since ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have accomplished to produce yet another wave of hype. This essay introduces a special issue on automation and communication in the digital society. It aims to study how subjectivity, agency, and empowerment become defined and re...

Die Rede von Praktiken ist in der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft weit verbreitet. Eine systematische Diskussion des Potenzials praxistheoretischer Denk- und Forschungsansätze steht dagegen noch aus. Dieses Buch ist eine Einladung zur tieferen Beschäftigung mit Medienpraktiken und wirbt für eine entsprechende Neuorientierung von Kommunikatio...

This variable describes the cultural pattern of a text/article. The concept of “cultural motifs” refers to phenomena which are culturally embedded and which support interpretations that are normally associated with “culture”. Cultural motifs are the core of a statement in the text. Entry connected to framing devices causal attributions Field of App...

Causal attributions are an element of a frame (Entman, 1991). Furthermore, a causal attribution organizes the anatomy of a problem within a text. Hereby, causal attributions provide explanations of problems in terms of their expectations, the underlying reasons or the causes that led to one or more problems depicted in the text. Entry connected to...

The following press sections are a collection that emerged from an inductive-deductive analysis of 26 periodicals from Germany, South Africa and the US. Overlaps on big topics were found and sub-topics assigned accordingly (Pentzold & Knorr, 2024). Field of Application/Theoretical Foundation Journalists usually publish their articles in topic-speci...

Framing devices manifest themselves in the use of linguistic expressions, metaphors, patterns of argumentation, and keywords. Entry is connected to causal attributions cultural motifs Field of Application/Theoretical Foundation Framing devices can be used as a variable to analyse how texts contribute to frames through of their use of idioms, metaph...

In digital culture, visualizations are a prevalent and ubiquitous form of communication. A veteran journalistic tool, and an increasingly popular one in digital politics, visualizations offer informative value, attract readership, and increase engagement. Visualizations’ multimodality enables them to convey rhetoric through informative, narrative a...

Whistleblowers have been instrumental in revealing the massive investments in state-sponsored and corporate digital surveillance and disinformation. Their personal accounts of what went on behind the scenes are usually presented in popular books marketed as offering insider stories. By interrogating the recapitulations of veteran data consultants,...

The article attempts to clarify what today constitutes communicative remembering. To revisit this basic mnemonic concept, our theoretical contribution starts from available approaches in social memory studies that assume a binary distinction between cultural and communicative modes of memory making. In contrast, we use concepts that treat them not...

In this article, we take issue with an idea of autonomous and efficient automation that is upheld through the paradoxical conjunction of a flawed vision of the technological fix and the under-acknowledged human work required to fill in the gaps between machines and users. Our argument is based on two case studies that sit at opposite tails of autom...

Memory is a communicative affair. It is inherently intertwined with communication, representing a complex interplay that has evolved throughout history. An expanding array of symbols and communication genres has played a pivotal role in influencing the ways in which we remember and forget the past. The significance of memory truly comes to the fore...

The shortcomings of top-down policies for rural development underscore the importance of local potentials and the role of citizens who are perceived as taking a more active role in shaping the future of rural areas. The engagement of the local population is facilitated by digitally-supported forms of civic participation. These technological service...

The “smart village” flourishes – at least in policy papers that envision the revitalization of rural areas through the civic deployment of networked media and telecommunications. Yet, while such aspirations are widespread, little is known about the views of those tasked with supervising and supporting digitally driven public participation for rural...

In this practice insight contribution, we reflect on our learnings from configuring and upholding a living lab as a third place in an urban and distinctively non-academic environment. Trying to make space for an empowering hospitality necessitated withholding our schemes and workshop plans so to facilitate grassroots endeavors on the side of the pe...

Living Labs galore. Involving citizens and other stakeholders in science endeavors and integrating them in the design of new technologies and scientific inquiry is a core aim of contemporary research and development. Living labs are prime places in the quest of science to be more inclusive and to open up to people from all walks of life, including...

In this article, we propose to treat agency as something which is accomplished in the entanglement of humans with technologies. This redirects our attention away from the question of what distinguishes humans from smart machines and towards querying how people and automated apparatuses join in processes of mutual sociomaterial engagement. To furthe...

Looking back at the 2019 Sharpiegate affair, the article investigates the articulation of “pre-truth,” which became evident when a willful ambivalence toward factual evidence dovetailed with a juxtaposition of provisional, future-oriented truth claims. In general, the maneuver works by taking predictive statements from the past and characterizing t...

In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the capabilities approach to better understand how ideas and values of data welfare intersect with and may allow for the ‘good’ life and human flourishing. The mai...

Each year, the president of the International Communication Association speaks to the plenary session of its annual conference. Conceptualizing the speeches as disciplinary talk, we examined them using a combination of qualitative content analysis and bibliometric study. The results show how presidential addresses either aimed to present a metaview...

In this workshop, we will venture into the current state of co-design for imagining and creating smart objects and services within the context of “the home”. Together with a diverse group of workshop participants, we will conduct two rounds of co-designing which gives each of the participants the opportunity to explore two of the following three to...

Der Beitrag stellt Michel Foucaults Schrift „Die Ordnung des Diskurses“ vor und diskutiert ihren Status als kommunikationswissenschaftliches Schlüsselwerk. In ihr formuliert Foucault seine Ideen zur Verknüpfung von Diskursen und den in ihnen hervorgebrachten Wissensordnungen mit Machtverhältnissen. Damit wird der kurze Text zu einer wichtigen Refer...

This article looks at artistic impressions of future robotics and considers how they inspire research into human–machine interaction. Our analysis of visual scientific practices and the epistemic ramifications of these speculative drawings emerges from a long-term participant observation study in a multi-disciplinary project on smart and autonomous...

Not infrequently, smart home imaginaries and installations are envisaged for nuclear families dwelling in detached houses fitted with the latest Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. In our article, we follow one approach to escape this powerful but inadequate projection that entails inviting people to imagine alternative forms of domestic IoT use. S...

The smart village is digitally networked and participatory. Its “smartness”, in other words, should be based on interaction between technological infrastructures and civic engagement.While this vision has inspired European policymaking and public discourse in recent years, understanding of the interaction between digitalization and civic participat...

Los intentos de darle a la mediatización su sustento en el tiempo han exhibido generalmente dos orientaciones temporales distintas. En un sentido, hay estudios indispensables sobre la historicidad de los procesos de mediatización que indagan las transformaciones de larga duración. En el sentido opuesto, los medios se consideran como agentes de acel...

Der Beitrag stellt am Beispiel der sogenannten ‚Snowden-Affare‘ Moglichkeiten einer integrativen Frame-Analyse vor. Sie berucksichtigt sowohl linguistische, insbesondere diskurssemantische, Aspekte der Wissensrahmung als auch kommunikationswissenschaftliche Zugange zur medialen Perspektivierung eines offentlich brisanten Themas. Wahrend ein diskurs...

The Coronavirus has prompted an urgent need for guidance and practical intervention. Newsmakers responded to this demand by providing outlooks that plotted the contagion’s contours against a host of parameters. The article looks back at this acute area of sensemaking where journalistic forecasts, epidemiological modelling, and policy measures inter...

This article studies the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a core example of the storage and sharing of commons-based digital materials. It focuses on the voluntary, day-to-day activities of its editors as they gather and transform digital information goods that are made available free of charge. Using the notion of articulation work, I stress the e...

This chapter includes interviews with leading practitioners discussing the future of peer production. The practitioners interviewed are Peter Bloom, Founder of Rhizomatica; Mariam Mecky, Communications Unit Head at HarassMap; Ory Okolloh, Co‐founder of Ushahidi; Abraham Taherivand, Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland; and Stefano Zacchiroli...

The regulation of peer production projects is usually achieved by the users themselves. Ideally, this self‐organization and self‐management depend on shared social norms and rules. This chapter provides an overview and comparison of peer production's institutions, traces their origins, and describes their implications for cooperation and governance...

This chapter examines a series of productive tensions located in and around peer production. It begins by interrogating the meaning of infrastructure for peer‐to‐peer models, and find that some forms of peer infrastructure have thrived, whilst others were effectively banned. The chapter considers Yochai Benkler's influential theorization of “common...

Peer production is commons‐based and commons‐oriented voluntary labor with participatory and transparent coordination. It decentralizes both goal setting and execution to networks of individuals. This chapter revisits the dual contribution of peer production to productive efficiency and to social justice. It then reflexively evaluates peer producti...

This chapter argues that significant social change is required to stave off climate destruction, and it makes the case that peer production can usefully contribute to necessary processes of “relocalization” and “degrowth.” The governance of peer produced projects, one of the central aspects of the studies of peer production, aspires to the self‐reg...

The future of data-driven journalism has attracted widespread attention, but what about the future in data journalism? In other words: How do future predictions shape the formulation of knowledge claims in newsmaking that relies on the analysis of large troves of digital data? Based on interviews with professionals working on such projects, we stud...

Ohne Erinnern keine Gesellschaft. Vergangenes zu vergegenwärtigen ist eine wesentliche Leistung und Bedingung von Gesellschaft und von zentraler Bedeutung für die Identitätsentwicklung und die soziale Einbettung von Individuen. Vergangenheit wird in Medienkommunikation nicht einfach bewahrt oder konserviert, sondern sie wird in kontingenten gegenwä...

This article examines the representation and use of quality time. It brings together an analysis of images tagged and shared under the hashtag #qualitytime on Instagram with an investigation into the trope’s resonance in everyday life. In the interviews and profiles studied in this article, people used the term to indicate and display instances of...

The text reflects on conceptualizations of media and time, and it introduces the articles of the special issue on the “Mediatization of time.”

Since its inception, the internet has been as much technological as social, practical as ideological in character. This article examines academic discourse and asks how research on the multifaceted internet has evolved over the past 25 years. In order to investigate the formation of this academic field, we collected articles published in major acad...

In our fast-forward times, the special issue ‘Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies’ examines the future-making capacity of networked services and digital data. Its contributions ask about the role media play in forecasting the future and their part in bringing it about. And they are interested in the ex...

This article analyzes the media representations circulating around the trials of the accused Nazi collaborator John/Ivan Demjanjuk. It examines the American, Dutch, German, Russian, Jewish-Dutch, and Jewish-American discourses that framed the consecutive legal proceedings in Israel, the U.S., and Germany. Our study interrogates the convergences and...

Our article examines how journalistic reports and online comments have made sense of computational politics. It treats the discourse around data-driven campaigns as its object of analysis and codifies four main perspectives that have structured the debates about the use of large data sets and data analytics in elections. We study American, British,...

It has become commonplace to speak of media practices as a nexus of doings and sayings. In our article, we scrutinize this fuzzy account and the forms of articulation it entails. We start by arguing that, to be recognized as social practices, activities-regardless of whether they are verbal utterances or wordless body movements-have to initiate a c...

The article proceeds from the interest in a practice-oriented vocabulary in culturalist studies of communication and media. It assesses whether a jump on the practice bandwagon can be justified by the contribution of praxeology to scholarly work that seeks to contextualize communicative routines or the production and appropriation of media. Setting...

Der Beitrag stellt analytische Perspektiven zur Rekonstruktion des Vollzugsgeschehens diskursiver Praktiken und der sich dabei zeichenhaft manifestierenden diskursiven Aussagemuster vor. Ausgehend vom Diskursalltag in vergierenden Medien wird dazu zum einen die rekursive Konstitution von Diskursen konzeptualisiert. Darauf aufbauend wird ein Spektru...

This article explores how newsmakers exploit numeric records in order to anticipate the future. As this nascent area of data journalism experiments with predictive analytics, we examine its reports and computer-generated presentations, often infographics and data visualizations, and ask what time frames and topics are covered by these diagrammatic...

Usually, the alluring notion of “affordances” comes with the idea that technology makes some activities possible while constraining others. Our article departs from this dichotomic view and seeks to appreciate the multiplicity of socio-material prefiguration. Discussing three empirical examples from human–robot communication, we show that the affor...

Our article examines the ways that journalists and public commentators in different countries have made sense of computational politics. It treats the discourse around data-driven campaigns as its object of analysis and codifies four main perspectives that have structured the debates about the use of large data sets and data analytics in elections....

Der Überblicksbeitrag hat das Ziel, mit der Unterscheidung von Diskursmustern und Diskurspraktiken zwei grundlegende Modi des diskurstheoretischen Verständnisses von Diskursen zu erfassen und daraus komplementäre diskursanalytische Perspektiven für Kommunikationsforschung und Medienanalyse abzuleiten. Damit trägt er zur konzeptuellen Fundierung und...

Imagining "big data" brings up a palette of concerns about their technological intricacies, political significance, commercial value, and cultural impact. We look at this emerging arena of public sense-making and consider the spectrum of press illustrations that are employed to show what big data are and what their consequences could be. We collect...

Das Initiativ-Netzwerk „Kommunikationsgeschichte digitalisieren: Historische Kommunikationsforschung im digitalen Zeitalter“ der Fachgruppe „Kommunikationsgeschichte“ der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft und des Nachwuchsforums „Kommunikationsgeschichte“ NaKoge, das sich mit diesem Beitrag vorstellt, verfolgt v...

The article asks how voluntary engagement in peer production is grounded in the day-today lives of highly engaged contributors. To study their routines, I turn to the English and German language editions of Wikipedia, the quintessential example of decentralized and nonproprietary cooperation. Taking issue with idealistic accounts of free and open d...

Aus Big Data, der massenhaften Sammlung und Auswertung der vielfältigen Daten, die durch die Digitalisierung aller Lebensbereiche entstehen, erwachsen neue Phänomene, die zentrale politikwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse und Konzepte infrage stellen und die durch moderne Gesellschaften bewertet und reguliert werden müssen. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es,...

Attempts to ground mediatisation in time have, this commentary argues, usually exhibited two distinct temporal orientations: their view is either quite far-sighted or short-sighted. In one direction, there are indispensable studies on the historicity of mediatisation processes. They examine long-term transformations that are inextricably linked to...

Die Einleitung führt sowohl in die Struktur des Bandes als auch in grundlegende Überlegungen zur Anwendung von Grounded Theory für das Erforschen medienbezogener Lebenswelten ein. In einer Vorüberlegung wird das Buch als Sammlung zu adaptierender Anwendungen statt fertiger ‚Patentrezepte‘ vorgestellt, um gemäß der Grounded Theory theoriegenerierend...

Im abschließenden Beitrag dieses Bandes wollen wir uns mit dem Status Quo des Verfahrens, insbesondere im deutschsprachigen Raum, auseinandersetzen. Dafür wählen wir eine Form, die aus unserer Sicht dem Ansinnen der Reflexion entgegenkommt: Ein Gespräch zwischen Herausgebern des Bandes und Andreas M. Scheu, der sich an anderer Stelle mit der Adapti...

Dieser Band ist ein Lehr- und Arbeitsbuch für theoriegenerierendes Forschen. Die Beiträge erklären Prinzipien der Grounded Theory und diskutieren deren methodisch fundierte Durchführung und Darstellung im Rahmen empirischer Vorhaben. An Beispielen aus der Forschungspraxis wird gezeigt, wie sich Methodologie und Verfahrensrahmen der Grounded Theory...

Der Beitrag hat drei Ziele: Erstens diskutiert er die methodologischen Grundlagen eines an der Grounded Theory orientierten Auswertungsverfahrens zum Rekonstruieren von verbalen und visuellen Medienframes. Dazu versteht er Grounded Theory als Verfahrensrahmen, leitet daraus Kodier- und Konzeptualisierungsschritte ab und bezieht sie auf Dokumentenko...

The article examines the construction of “Big Data” in media discourse. Rather than asking what Big Data really is or is not, it deals with the discursive work that goes into making Big Data a socially relevant phenomenon and problem in the first place. It starts from the idea that in modern societies the public understanding of technology is large...

Conference Report: Workshop Power and Politics of Mundane Memories. Tracing, Templating and Transforming Everyday Life. London (March 24, 2017), King’s College London.

Der Artikel erfasst kommunikationswissenschaftliche Theoriearbeit zwischen Komplexitätssteigerung und Komplexitätsreduzierung. Zunächst wird die Dynamik theoretischer Entwicklungen in der Kommunikationswissenschaft auf das Zusammenspiel interdisziplinärer und innerdisziplinärer konzeptueller Tendenzen sowie der Transformation empirischer Gegenstand...

Theoriebildung, also das Entwickeln, Formulieren, Diskutieren und Anwenden theoretischen Wissens in Form verallgemeinerter Konzepte, erklärender Modelle oder analytischer Begriffe, bewegt sich stets im Spannungsverhältnis von Verkomplizierung und Vereinfachung. Das Anliegen der Kommunikationswissenschaft, die Bedingungen, Vorgänge und Konsequenzen...

The article ties together codified ethical premises, proceedings of ethical reasoning, and field-specific ethical reflections so to inform the ethnography of an Internet-based collaborative project. It argues that instead of only obeying formal statutes, practical judgment has to account for multiple understandings of ethical issues in the research...

This article investigates the scopic regimes of computer-mediated peer production and the possibilities for seeing, knowing, and governing that are entailed in its accomplishment. Examining the case of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the analysis takes a closer look at the everyday routines of mutual observation and the tools that authors have c...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize digitized and digital information as well as a key contemporary digital heritage endeavor in itself. Capitalizing on this dual nature of the project, this article introduces Wikipedia as a digital gateway to and site of active engagement with cultural he...

Der Beitrag umreist die kommunikationswissenschaftliche Perspektive auf den strategischen Sprachgebrauch in politischer Kommunikation. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf Konzepten und Methoden, um Deutungsmuster bzw. Frames aus sprachlichem Diskursmaterial zu rekonstruieren. Der Grund für diese Ausrichtung des Beitrags liegt darin, dass sich das Untersuchen...

Öffentliche Kommunikation sieht sich derzeit durch »Fake News« und »Hate Speech« im Internet und zum Teil maschinell gesteuerte Kampagnen in den sozialen Netzen bedroht. Echokammern, Filterblasen und Social Bots sind nur einige Schlagworte in der Debatte. Diese Bedrohungen betreffen besonders die Wissenschaftskommunikation, weil sie das Vertrauen i...