About
The HUB at Clemson University
The Media Forensics Hub is located within the Watt Family Innovation Center on Clemson’s main campus. The Hub’s values and goals align closely with its home at the Watt Center. The Watt Family Innovation Center utilizes state-of-the-art information technology and facilities to enable graduate and undergraduate Clemson students to think outside of perceived boundaries and ultimately think ahead of the curve. Faculty and students are welcomed at the Hub and Watt Center as an Innovation Space designed to stimulate ideas, research skills, and collaborative endeavors. The Watt Center opened in January 2016 as a focal point for multi-disciplinary activity at Clemson. The Media Forensics Hub was formed in May, 2020, in order to build upon the nationally recognized research performed by Clemson University faculty who were among the first to identify the organized campaign of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. The South Carolina Research Authority (SCRA) is a founding partner of the Watt Family Innovation Center, and is the initial sponsor of the Media Forensics Hub. SCRA’s research gift supports faculty, grad students, undergraduate interns, and academic initiatives including a Creative Inquiry research project.
Mission Statement
The Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University builds society's capacity to understand the context, origins, and impact of modern media. As part of the Watt Family Innovation Center, we accomplish this by connecting scientific expertise with practical application: faculty with students, academics with practitioners, social scientists with engineers, experts with the public, and South Carolina with the world.
By Media Forensics; we mean the development and application of state-of-the-art techniques to broaden and deepen our understanding of all media types, while working to increase the capacity of our students and community to apply them. The Hub accomplishes this by spanning multiple disciplines and approaches, from history and case studies, to AI and machine learning, to experiments in the lab and the field.
We connect widely-spaced entities with a common interest from across disciplines, centers, institutions, and perspectives. Whether students, faculty, staff, journalists, policymakers, practitioners, organizers, or simply members of the public if you are interested in some aspect of media and are willing to connect with others, we will provide physical and digital space to support such engagement and collaboration.
