Katharina Brunner

digital home base

Portfolio & Projects

I have experience in several areas:

Data Journalism and Data Science

Under Surveillance: How Location Data Jeopardizes German Security (Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2024)

Together with netzpolitik.org we uncovered people with access to intelligence services in Germany. We were able to do that because we had hundreds of GBs of GPS positions of smartphones. This is not only a massive privacy problem, but also one for national security.

Internet youth protection filter blocks educational content (Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2024)

Germany’s official youth protection filter often prevents access to websites with educational content for teenagers. This issue affects not only private providers but also public institutions, as revealed by investigations conducted by BR Data and netzpolitik.org. We set up a test

Tagesschau.de: Aufklärungsseiten für Jugendliche nicht erreichbar
BR24: Offizieller Jugendschutz-Filter blockiert Aufklärungsseiten
Netzpolitik.org: Deutschlands wichtigster Jugendschutz-Filter blockiert Hilfsangebote

Kandidatencheck for the state elections in Bavaria (Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2023)

A total of 1,035 direct candidates for 15 parties stood for election in Bavaria in the state elections in 2023. Who are they and what do they stand for? We asked them all the same questions and more than 800 people took part. They all answered questions on the most relevant topics of the election campaign.

BR24: Landtagswahl: Checken Sie hier Ihre Kandidaten

Training data for AI: We Are All Raw Material for AI (Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2023)

Training data for artificial intelligence include enormous amounts of images and text gathered from millions of websites. Our analysis of the LAION 5B dataset shows that it frequently contains sensitive and private data – usually without the knowledge of those concerned.

Artikel auf Deutsch

Story in English

Elisa Harlan and me were awarded with Datenschutz Medienpreis of Berufsverband der Datenschutzbeauftragten Deutschlands (BvD)

How China Is Instrumentalizing the FAO (ARD/BR/MDR/SWR, 2023)

A story about dangerous pesticides and geostrategic interests in the context of the „Silk Road“. An investigation into Chinese influence on the United Nations. My contribution was the analysis of leaked data and documents of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

Me looking serious on TV due to serious investigation on world affairs.
Me looking serious on TV due to serious investigation on world affairs.

Film in German (with English subtitles)

Audit of raciness APIs (Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2023)

Several companies offer to check images for raciness and output a probability value. Services like this are used in content moderation. At BR Data, we examined four of these services (Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Sightengine) and found (1) a gender bias and (2) significantly different ratings for the same image, depending on the manufacturer of the software.

BR24.de: Zu sexy: Wie KI-Algorithmen Frauen benachteiligen können

I talked about it on 11km, a Tageschau-Podcast (in German)

This investigation was a cooperation with Guardian US. Their story: ‘There is no standard’: investigation finds AI algorithms objectify women’s bodies

Interview about the methodology (Online-Recherche Newsletter)

Remove NA: A knowledge graph about queer history, (Prototype Fund 2022)

The Remove NA project links data science and domain knowledge with the goal of weaving queer data into the web of open, linked data. Results, an essay, and methodology are available on

The project was funded by Prototype Fund and the German Ministry of Science and Education.

Operation „Honigbiene“, (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019)


Anyone entering China by land must know what to expect: The border police raids the smartphone, then an app extracts a lot of private information. We received the code of the surveillance app and analysed the code.

The story was awarded with Journalistenpreis für Informatik Universität Saarland and got a „honorable mention“ from the researchnetwork surveillance-studies.org.

„Blaue Bücher, rosa Bücher“ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019)

Pirates for boys and fairies for girls? We investigated 50k German language children’s books and identified enduring stereotypes around gender. I was primarily working on a network analysis. Nominated for the Digital Humanities Award 2018.

“Wie hat Ihr Stimmkreis gewählt?” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018)

Writing by numbers: After an election there are two tasks for journalism. First, report the results instantly (which is easy) and second interpret the results (which is not that easy). We wanted to do these two things in an automated way and as fast as possible for all election districts in Bavaria and Hesse. The approach were auto-generated texts and visualisations based on the results of every single district in Bavaria and Hesse: Did a district vote extraordinarily? Similar to the national level? Just slightly different? The method for finding differences was the Jenks algorithm.

Das gespaltene Parlament (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018)

Using text mining in political reporting. How does a right-wing, populist party change the atmosphere and the debates in the German parliament? Answers can be found in the official protocols of the Bundestag. The story was awarded with the Nannenpreis 2019.

“Wie wir über Umfragen berichten” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017)

Show more uncertainty to be more precise. Traditionally, media outlets are reporting about a new poll in the following style:

If an election would be held today, party x would get y percent of the votes. This is a decline of z percent compared to the previous week.

Covering polls like this is oversimplifying and even dangerous. Polls have real impact on decisions of politicians and voters, e.g. due to feedback loops. Pollsters want to mirror the views of a whole electorate by asking 1000 to 2000 people. Of course, there is uncertainty. The approach: Making the visualization more complex, but more precise by showing the uncertainty.

Der Facebook-Faktor – Wie das soziale Netzwerk die Wahl beeinflusst (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017)

Getting an idea of the blackbox Facebook: Investigating the political sphere on Facebook by crawling the sites of political parties and active users. We evaluated more than one million public Facebook likes from a little less than 5000 politically interested Facebook users.

Awarded with the Acatech prize for Tech Journalism 2017.

Research

Digitization Strategies of German Federal States (Katharina Brunner, Andreas Jager, Thomas Hess, Ursula Münch), Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt):

How Can Politics Shape the Digital Transformation? The study traces the development of strategies at the state level and examines how defined measures can be steered and implemented.

https://www.bidt.digital/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/bidt_publikation_digitalisierungsstrategien_landscape_mockup-scaled.jpg
A fancy picture of the printed publication.

Software

I published the following open-source software packages:

Generative Art

The R package generativeart let’s you create images based on many thousand points. The position of every single point is calculated by a formula, which has random parameters. Because of the random numbers, every image looks different.

Destatis Cleaner

Update May 2020: This package is no longer needed. The Federal Statistical Office of Germany, Destatis, listened to it’s users: You can now download data as a flat file csv or use an API.

The csv files of Destatis, the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, don’t comply with common standards if a tidy, ready-to-use machine-readable dataset. This tools helps to jump start the data analysis by doing the time-consuming cleaning tasks:

You can find Destatis Cleaner on apps.katharinabrunner.de/destatiscleaner/

If you are an R user, you can work with the destatiscleanr package. You can find the code and instructions on Github

germanpolls

A few files of code to get German polling data from wahlrecht.de on to your computer: Github

Technical Writing/Tutorials