In the last few months, I've been working with a great team of scholars putting together a study commissioned by the FCC. The project provides a critical review of existing research on the information needs of communities in the US. Major points include defining individual and community critical needs, examining the [...]
Once a year, the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) at USC and the Science of Networks in Communities Laboratory (SONIC) at Northwestern University convene an international seminar on network science. The conference organizers include Manuel Castells, Noshir Contractor, Janet Fulk, and Peter Monge. The seminar that took place at USC this April [...]
Just finished & uploaded to YouTube: a slidecast for our Alhambra Source project. The Source is a participatory news platform aimed at enhancing civic engagement at the community level. Its development was largely based on grounded communication research. The site was launched in 2010 as a collaboration between the COMM & [...]
Exploring the structure of relationships between news organizations, issues, and audience members is key to understanding the media system. The paper I'm posting here (just presented at ICA 2011, Boston) looks into a range of network types available to media researchers: inter-organizational, semantic, issue, hyperlink, and social graphs. It discusses important predictors [...]
The Alhambra project is a collaboration between Metamorphosis and the USC Annenberg Journalism School. The project looks at the potential of new media to promote civic engagement and intergroup interactions. The product of it all - Alhambra Source - is a community news website serving a diverse city in LA County. [...]
Google’s recent launch of Ngram – a service that shows the frequencies of phrases appearing in indexed books – opened up new possibilities for data exploration fun. A game that data geeks can now play involves comparing the popularity of phrases in books vs. the frequency of their appearance as search [...]
This semantic map takes a cue from Chris Anderson's The-Future-of-Journalism visualization post @ Nieman Lab. CWA makes the fair point that any time we see a dramatic event / scientific discovery /technological innovation occurring, someone will invariably cry out "Oh, but what could that possibly mean for journalism?". The network below [...]