Project Work

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From January 2021 to present  I have been employed as a post-doc in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, working on an AHRC-funded project with Porfessor Stephen Cushion on disinformation - “Countering Disinformation. Enhancing journalistic legitimacy in public service media,” 

Before this, I worked for Cardiff University on three studies from May to December 2020. The first was on a report for the BBC on journalists use of social media. The second was an AHRC-funded study on alternative media sources in the the UK. The third was an examination of reporting on devolution in reference to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I have worked for more than three years with the Civic Culture and Contentious Politics research group in the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The research project, titled “Communication Ecologies, Political Contention, and Democratic Crisis”  investigates the communication landscape of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the role it played in influencing the political ecology of the state. The research team was recently awarded a $1m Knight Foundation grant, $411,000 UW 2020 grant plus over $300,000 in additional external grant funding to continue the work. The Centre for Communication and Civic Renewal was established at Madison in 2019.

In autumn 2019 I was named the Knight Fellow of Communication and Civic Renewal for 2019-2023. 

The project PIs are: Kathy Cramer, Lew Friedland, Dhavan Shah, Mike Wagner, Chris Wells, Bill Sethares and Karl Rohe. 

I have primarily focused on collecting media archives, undertaking qualitative coding of talk radio data and quantitative analyses of media data using natural language processing software (Wordstat, LIWC, Leximancer, Diction). 

We have recently moved to the paper development phase of the project. I am a co-author on two recently published papers with a further two currently under different stages of review . We have a book contract with Cambridge University Press with the book scheduled for publication in early 2021.

Prior to my work on the CCCP project, I worked for one year as a Project Assistant for a project titled “Project DATA: Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis.”

Project DATA is an investigation of the practice of microtargeting by political parties. It was funded by the Vice-Chancellor’s office for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a partnership with Princeton University and non-profit organizations. The PI is Young Mie Kim. The project collected browsing data and survey information from volunteers regarding political microtargeting in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

As the Project Assistant, I set up data collection during the 2016 primary period which served as a pilot before the General Election. I helped develop the survey questionnaire and worked with programmers to develop the browser extension which collected the data. I developed the codebook for the ad categorization and undertook extensive data analysis. More information on the project is available at: www.eyeonelections.com