Report by EMS Master’s students Fengyan Wang, Wanchun Liu, and Yimeng Sun
Since the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become the center of discussion around the world. The topics discussed in different countries may vary significantly due to differences in cultural background. However, topics could also arise and evolve as countries cooperate and communicate with each other to fight the pandemic. Dr. Lei Guo, an assistant professor in the Division of Emerging Media Studies, has recently launched a new website project called Communicating COVID-19, which provides a weekly update of the main topics in international news coverage of COVID-19, currently including the United States, China, and South Korea. The project is conducted by researchers at Boston University’s AIEM research group remotely through online communication during the ongoing situation. This week, we invited Dr. Guo to introduce the project and provide more details about the research going on beyond the website.
What is your intention with this project? What opportunities does it offer?
This is one of the research projects that our research team AIEM has been working on. We are interested in international news coverage of different public issues and the impact of this coverage on public opinion in different countries. Thus far, we have analyzed the gun violence issue, climate change, and immigration. As the outbreak of COVID-19 became the international media focus, we naturally turned our attention to this topic. As a side project, we have created a website to present some of our research findings of the media coverage of COVID-19. We combine communication research methods and computational methods to automate the analysis of news coverage and update the results weekly. Since this is an international issue and outbreaks are still growing rapidly in many countries, we think it may be helpful for the public to learn the news attention in their own countries and abroad.
How were you able to recruit your members from different domains?
Our research team consists of faculty members and students from both the Colleges of Communication and Computer Science. Our M.A. student Yimeng Sun and Ph.D. student Sejin Paik are helping with data collection, content analysis, and web development. We also have members from institutions outside of BU. We have a student collaborator from Northeastern University and a collaborator from Kayak.
What is the most challenging part of this project?
We are in the process of adding more countries to the analysis and will need more research collaborators who specialize in the computational analysis of different languages. Coordinating a large group of researchers is a challenge.
What will be the future of this project?
We hope we will have a dynamic website to present trending news topics related to COVID-19 in a large number of countries. We will also add more analyses beyond major news topics.