New Media Communications

Overview

PhD Comm Studies, Iowa. Rank: associate professor with tenure. I have been coordinator of New Media Communications since 2016, director of the GameLab since 2012, co-chair general education 2022-2024. My research is in Cultural Analytics.

In terms of a global overview, I am interested in how larger logistical factors (technical, legal, and financial) shape the kinds of material that flow through social media systems. In my dissertation research, this was primarily about the development of post-network television systems and then emergent social flows. One of the challenging issues is determining what the text really is and what was presented. My research began to shift from producing films and television like experiences to flash programs and other computationally driven work in network analysis, image plotting, scraping, and other methods. At the end of the line for this trajectory of my research are methods that can then establish possible connections between changes in logistics and social media as it is rendered for users. This puts in me in a middle of a triangle between logistical media studies, design, and computer science. Increasingly, I am interested in all social media that are NOT Twitter.

Active Research Projects

• Augmenting social network methods with neural networks (or other machine learning classifiers) trained to model real human semantic judgments
• Cascade social media attacks and inter-media agenda setting - Publication
• Sentiment analysis of longitudinal text data about political candidates
• Research methods in spaces featuring strategic/adversarial actors
• Markov Chain Methods in Critical Social Research (especially in regard to TikTok)
• Computer Vision/Image Processing methods for the analysis of the visual dimensions of social media events - Publication software to accomplish this research in R: ImagePlotX
• Deployment and evaluation of advanced advertising modalities for Snapchat and Pinterest

Places to Find My Work

I have been known to blog on Medium, a lot of research findings that won't be headed for journals end up there. My code generally ends up on GitHub. Here is my Twitter. Because of my research I am active on all platforms. My webpage.

Selling Social Media, my book. 

Recent interviews: RiA podcast, VICE, Daily Beast, Slate, Futurism, Fortune, Toward Data Science, KGW

What do I teach?

Not all classes are in all modalities, I typically teach two classes per term. My slate of courses includes/has included:

• NMC 101 Introduction to New Media
• NMC 240 Survey of Social Media (now taught by X. Lu)
• NMC 245 Cultural Analytics and Data Science - all class assets on GitHub 
• NMC 260 New Media Futures - open-access textbook 
• NMC 340 Social Media Strategy (now taught by X. Lu)
• NMC 399 (special topics): Small Screens (a class on developing specialty web and AR products, taught as a one-week experience 2013-2019).
• NMC 470 Media Law (with an intellectual property emphasis)

At Oregon State, I am not affiliated with a graduate program. As a free-agent I work with graduate students ad hoc, especially about fun translational comm-design-computational ideas. Reach out to me if that is something of interest. 

I  lead a PLC on exam design (design of formative exams), several CTL events, UCF's BlendKit, and more. My instructional focus is on creating high-intensity student-student interactions (especially simulations and games) on a regular basis, within appropriate context.