Fellow Miriam Brinberg: On the Forefront of Digital News Dynamics Research
03/31/2026Exploring the dynamics of digital news consumption, Miriam Brinberg’s research moves beyond static measures to capture how media exposure unfolds over time. During her fellowship at the Weizenbaum Institute, she collaborated on innovative approaches to understanding digital interactions—highlighting the power of interdisciplinary research in advancing the study of media effects.
Miriam Brinberg is an assistant professor at the School of Communication at Ohio State University in the United States and was a fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in March 2026. Her research focuses on everyday interpersonal interactions and on developing methods to better understand them. The overarching theme of her research is describing the dynamics of interpersonal interaction – in face-to-face and computer-mediated contexts – and how those dynamics are associated with individual and relational characteristics. In her work, she applies and advances “traditional” dyadic methods and works with intensive longitudinal data from interactions in the lab, ecological momentary assessments, and unobtrusive digital monitoring (e.g., long sequences of temporally ordered screenshots, text messages).
During her time at the institute, she worked on a project with Weizenbaum researchers Jakob Ohme and Yangliu Fan (research group: Digital News Dynamics), focused on the conceptualization of media exposure as sequences and the potential impacts of these sequences. “I am excited about this project because it moves beyond treating media exposure as an aggregated measure or discrete event and instead captures the temporal and contextual flow of media usage“, Miriam Brinberg states. The researchers hope that the study of media exposure sequences will open new possibilities for researchers to theorize and test questions about media effects.
Miriam Brinberg greatly appreciates the interdisciplinary nature of the research group: “bringing people together with different backgrounds and training generates new ideas and perspectives that help push the field forward“. She emphasizes that the interdisciplinary approach to studying the digital environment is a significant strength of the Weizenbaum Institute that brings the research group “Digital News Dynamics“ to the forefront of collecting and examining digital trace data to study human behavior.
About the Fellowship:
The Weizenbaum Institute Fellowship enables national and international researchers at all career stages to carry out joint research projects and establish long-term collaborations. The goal is to bring new perspectives to the Institute’s research and to strengthen academic networking further. Since the Institute’s founding in 2017, over 357 fellows from 47 countries have been affiliated with the Weizenbaum Institute—an international diversity that our format „Weizenbaum & Friends“ showcases regularly.
