What do you see as the biggest challenges for educating future journalists in digital literacy? How does the lab approach that you have developed in Halle-Wittenberg benefit data-driven journalism projects and teach critical competencies for students and practitioner 

First, it is necessary to discuss and define the contexts of digital literacy. It starts by reflecting on what spheres of action are included. Digital literacy is related to political, economic, or societal questions and contexts, its linkages, and its questions of agency just completed by technology and infrastructural dimensions. In my view, you can just educate a critical way of thinking and exploring questions of digital literacy and to mind ethical, social, and other value-based questions by doing so. 

The biggest challenge is to cover digital literacy holistically. A multi-perspective approach and case-based proceeding fit this goal best. 

But what can be meant by this? Exploring journalistic practices and journalistic issues by doing media and by reflecting and approaching them in a customary or experimental scientific way opens a more profound understanding of journalistic practices and their boundaries and challenges for students and researchers. Data-driven projects are demanding and insightful cases as they are agile and need lots of expertise. Data and journalistic competencies are required combined with ideas of storytelling, design, and knowledge about the audiences' needs. These affordances are highly challenging even for journalistic professionals. 

Our lab approach allows us to cover these complex demands of a data-driven project also by trial and error. Hardly without any economic or time-related pressure it is possible to test, to try again, and to use creative methods such as design thinking for better results. On the other hand, our academic surrounding enables us to involve other disciplines and interested external partners. 

Using the lab approach means exploring and activating the trading zones between journalism, science, and art by doing media and experimenting with technological and different journalistic approaches. Sometimes we aim to create impact and to reach audiences. Sometimes our data-driven projects are an ideal starting point to push reflection and arouse awareness towards datafication or data-driven infrastructures. When we engage in data-driven tasks or work on them with media partners and our students, everyone benefits from engaging with the requirements and questions of such a project. In addition, our lab approach responds to audiences‘ interests and needs or simply experiments to gain insights or new questions. 

By combining journalistic and scientific approaches, i.e. realizing data-driven projects in collaboration with various media, cultural, or business partners, we can address relevant topics and increase the chance of communicative or societal impact and understanding. 

How do infrastructures matter to citizens? 

This is an important question. First, infrastructures provide or prevent accessibility, whether they are real infrastructures or (post)digital or virtual infrastructures. Thus, infrastructures are always political and critical. Infrastructures are an essential part of democracy by creating or disrupting connections between citizens and their national, communal, and societal communities. This hypothesis does not depend on the material of infrastructures - so infrastructures are as relevant and important in their 20th-century-real-live versions as in the digital equivalents or the case of all new types of infrastructures. Infrastructures are crucial to the extent to which a citizen is enabled or empowered to participate in society. Those who build and invent infrastructures also decide on this possibility of participation. I would recommend involving citizens and users in the development processes. 

How should knowledge about infrastructures be communicated and what role can journalists, researchers, or public officials play? 

 Knowledge about infrastructures should be communicated as accessible and understandable as infrastructures themselves should be in an ideal world. The three professions mentioned have several things in common: 1: They deal with knowledge by inventing, mapping, and selecting it, communicating it, and developing solutions for current and future problems. 2: They shape and frame the way and narratives in which people think about infrastructures and their usability. 3: Journalists, researchers, and public officials are supposed to serve society, although they are bound by their conscience and professional values. Thus, they are responsible in different ways for social opportunities, interaction, and the dialog and resonance of the ideas and solutions developed. For this reason, I would like to suggest working with different target groups to get to know their life and communication-related needs and to be able to anticipate these in the future.