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Cinema & Media Studies

Penn filmmaking class shares the stories of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods
Two students take video of archivist holding up newspaper clipping.

Student filmmakers Harper Prentice and Hosaena Tilahun interviewed Alisha Davis, a former history teacher who has served as the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Hyperlocal Heritage archivist since August 2025. As part of America 250, Davis has been surveying collections held at Parkway Central Library and identifying archival materials for digitization, use in programming, and preservation.

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Penn filmmaking class shares the stories of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods

Graduate and undergraduate students in Alissa Jordan’s course partnered with community organizations to create five short films that touch on education, archiving, and grassroots organizing in Germantown, Northeast Philadelphia, and West Philadelphia.

3 min. read

Cutting through the cluttered media landscape
Duncan Watts and the lab members of Media Bias Lab.

Duncan Watts (far left) and managing director Jeanne Ruane (second from left) with members of Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab.

(Image: Courtesy of Inspiring Impact)

Cutting through the cluttered media landscape

Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab’s Media Bias Detector team, under founder and director Duncan Watts, explores how people behave, how media works, how society functions, and how the human mind operates.

From Penn Inspiring Impact

2 min. read

100 years of television
An old television set in front of curtained windows.

Image: Thom Lang via Getty Images

100 years of television

Annenberg faculty reflect on the history of television and the social, political, and technological changes its viewers experienced through the medium.

From Annenberg School for Communication

2 min. read

What can mainstream journalism learn from prison journalism?

What can mainstream journalism learn from prison journalism?

In their study of the prison publication News Inside, Annenberg School for Communication associate professor Sarah J. Jackson and doctoral candidate Liz Hallgren find lessons for mainstream news.

New global media textbook edited by Annenberg’s Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

New global media textbook edited by Annenberg’s Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

A new edited collection from Annenberg School for Communication professor Juan Llamas-Rodriguez titled “Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media” brings readers on a tour of media beyond the typical U.S. canon.