SPLEE

Europe needs democracy.

But democracy also needs Europe, not only in the form of treaties, governmental and administrative institutions, but as a lived European exchange carried by the debates of a broad European populace.

This has never been more evident than today, as damaged discourses—attacked and manipulated by fake news, lies, and propaganda—endanger democracies around the world.

Yet, even after decades of European unification, there is still no EU-wide, transnational communication in print, audio, and visual media. There is no European flagship outlet like “European Times,” nor any prominent radio or television channels.

Similar to defense and digitization, we must become independent—independent from the American leading media read worldwide in English. Europe must, alongside (geo)political and economic sovereignty, also pursue discursive sovereignty.

Europe has strong publications of high journalistic quality, which so far have scarcely been received beyond their national borders.

We want to change that. We aim to make the debate contributions, longreads, and essays of European media accessible to everyone on our continent—and to the entire world.

Not only readers would benefit, but also journalists, publishing bodies, and publishers: by amplifying Europe’s diverse discourses both internally and externally, giving Europe a voice that can be heard globally.

Print media such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and British outlets like The Economist or The Guardian have received a major boost through digitization: they are read worldwide today. By contrast, the reach of media of comparable quality—Die Zeit, Le Monde, Il Corriere della Sera—has hardly changed. The reason is obvious: English is more widespread than any other European language. Moreover, the cultural dominance of the USA stands opposite a Europe that has come together politically and economically but has scarcely grown together as a social and cultural unit. The EU has not matured into an imagined community whose citizens feel part of a family.

The linguistic barriers within Europe, long a real obstacle, are becoming increasingly permeable thanks to AI translations. Every day it becomes easier to translate essays and longreads from European quality media and make them digitally available to all Europeans—and to the world.

SPLEE intends to open up this space as a digital platform: the space for a public discourse in Europe. We want to network European thought by translating essays and longreads and thus bring national discourses into conversation with each other.

The SPLEE platform demonstrates that this is technically possible, and it also serves as a call to action:

LET’S START NOW!

SPLEE sees itself as a work in progress. Funding under the DATIpilot – Innovationssprint line announced by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) enables us to build the platform, conduct feasibility studies (licensing agreements, business models, technical implementation, building an editorial team, etc.), and research data visualization. In the long term, however, the idea of SPLEE can only be realized with the help of strong media and financial partners. Therefore, we are also recruiting collaborators for a continuation of the project who are willing to develop SPLEE with us into a self-sustaining business model.

Journalistic offerings are changing, just as media consumption is. Therefore, we are experimenting with ways to analyze media discourses and present them as data visualizations.

The data visualizations shown here are to be understood as experiments demonstrating the potential of a semiquantitative media analysis of news data. Beyond the individual article, these experiments are based on one year of reporting by two internationally renowned news media: The New York Times (USA) and Die Zeit (DE). The visualizations take a close look at the digital editorial strategies of both newspapers; they use the articles’ metadata to represent various aspects of coverage. With these experiments, we present a first proof of concept of new visual possibilities for presenting journalistic reporting and preparing news data for potential readers.

SPLEE uses AI for text translation and is also in the research and development stage here: What might an editorial team look like that only edits machine translations of previously published texts? How reliable are these translations, and how much effort is required to publish them without quality loss?

SPLEE is funded by the BMBF under the DATIpilot – Innovationssprints program as a joint project of the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and the German Institute for the Good Life (difgl).

Funding period: 01.06.2024 to 30.11.2025

The realization of SPLEE requires an alliance of European media houses and many other supporters. For implementation, SPLEE is seeking financial sponsors as well as international editorial teams and publishers willing to engage with the platform and jointly build a European editorial team.

Support us!

As media partners: provide us on a trial basis with initial longreads and essays—for example, on the topic of “European sovereignty”—that have already been published in your print or online medium.

Provide us with your APIs for our data visualization.

Donate.

The machine translations of the texts are improving every day. Nevertheless, we review the results with an editorial eye. That is not possible in all languages. We welcome support in editing the translations in all languages. Contact us if you can help us with Latvian, Maltese, French, or any other language. Upon request, we will list the names of the editors here in the Community section.

English translation checked by Emily Poel

Katja Anclam, Christoph Henseler
difgl – Executive Management

Dr. Kerstin Lücker
difgl – Project Initiator, Project Contact

Alexander Polivanov
difgl – Fellow, Research Associate

Greta Lauk
difgl – Student Assistant

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Angela Brennecke
Filmuniversität Babelsberg – Dean of Faculty II

Dr. Kim Albrecht
Filmuniversität Babelsberg – Research, Data Visualization

Dr. Francesca Morini
Filmuniversität Babelsberg – Postdoctoral Researcher

Jörn Krug
Filmuniversität Babelsberg – Head of Startup Services

Sebastian Herbst
Filmuniversität Babelsberg – Startup Services Associate

Dr. Kerstin Lücker
difgl – Project Coordination
kl@difgl.de

We are pleased to be funded by: