By Yelena Rodolitz
We recently had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Ayse Lokmanoglu, the first of our newly-appointed faculty to be featured in our Spotlight series. Ayse is an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Media Studies program, and conducts interdisciplinary research that engages the fields of communication, computational social science, and the digital humanities.
Ayse Lokmanoglu is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the IEEE VIS 2023 Best Paper Award and two top paper awards from the National Communication Association’s Division. Prior to joining the EMS faculty body, Lokmanoglu was an Assistant Professor at Clemson University, where she served as a core faculty member of the Media Forensics Hub.
Yelena: Can you tell us a bit about the nature of your previous research?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: Of course I can! My ongoing research looks at how we can understand visuals in big data; basically, in social media, or news media, how can we develop new tools to analyze them similar to how we analyze text? Can we semantically categorize and cluster visuals? My ongoing project is more methodological, but I’m very interested specifically in two types of images; in my first one, images that are used to distort reality. It’s very hard to detect misinformation, disinformation, and malicious information in images. So how can we find ways to detect them and cluster them, and how then do we deal with these images? What are some of those ways?
And the second thing I’m interested in, which I’ve been working on for a long time, is altered images such as memes. How do we examine generated images on large scale? How is it that when an altered image becomes an icon, can it have more lasting meaning than a still photograph? Those are the two things that I’ve been trying to understand and to develop a visual method for large-scale analysis, which is going to be live very soon!
Yelena: That’s fascinating! What are some of the most interesting or salient findings from your project so far?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: One of the big findings for our project is that visuals do matter. Dr. Grabe, one of the leading names in visual communication, established the importance of visuals in political communication. Visuals are tools of messaging, and can be very persuasive. When we cluster visuals semantically, we can see patterns and themes that are very intuitive and also very fascinating. So when we look at news images, we can see how, for example, climate and disaster are clustered together semantically and visually, and holding to visual communication theories.
Yelena: What brought you to where you are now in your research, and how has your academic background influenced your interests?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: I will say it’s passion, but also life and the world. I started my undergrad doing Middle Eastern studies in Economics because in the early 2000s, everyone was interested in economic development. So I was also one of those, thinking that we’re all gonna go into banking and help the world become a better place. But then the 2008 crisis happened. So, every job offer I had got rescinded, and I was like, “Okay, I need to find something else to do”, because I don’t have a career path in banking at this moment in time. I had already double majored in Near Eastern Studies and was very passionate about political communication. Growing up as a minority in Turkey, I was very interested in the education system and what was in it. I was specifically interested in religious education in Turkey because I was exempt from it.
I was very lucky at Harvard that I had amazing advisors who were all like, “Go for it, research this”. I was trained in qualitative research methods in my master’s. The Arab Spring happened and we had the social media awakening, so I went back to work as a political consultant, where most of my work was people asking about what’s going on in social media. Can you look at social media? Can you tell us about trends in social media? So I started developing my computational skills and working and building upon the computational skills from undergrad, which helped. Not the development Econ part, but the computational, the quantitative classes.
So when I was applying for a PhD, everything led me to communication because communication was the most welcoming field. I wanted to look at the internet and combine interdisciplinary methods. As a field, it gave me the flexibility to do what I wanted, but it also taught me the theory to ground, challenge, and methodological advancement. So I was very, very fortunate to end up where I am.
I am and have always been interested in text and visuals targeting people and excluding people. Why is it out there? And how can we understand it and try to minimize it? Also, what relationship do we have, online or offline?
Yelena: Absolutely, I completely agree. I think it’s important to be adaptable, and let your research interests guide you. How do you see your field of research being shaped by emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: The good thing about emerging media studies is that we’ve been dealing with emerging media for a very long time. So everything that comes new is emerging, and everything brings with it certain risks, certain excitement, certain opportunities, and certain disadvantages. AI helped me a lot in visual clustering, as it is a part of the methodology. AI is a very useful tool, as long as we use it for ourselves, but we don’t let it dictate to us, our research, or our thinking. But learning how to use this new, emerging technology is important, and it brings a lot of advantages to our field. It is essential to know how to use these emerging technologies, and be open to them, but not lose our critical thinking skills.
Yelena: With AI bots proliferating the social media sphere, how does this affect your research?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: We have always had bots in different ways. AI bots are more advanced than the bots that we’re used to, but the social media sphere has changed a lot as well.
The thing to keep in mind is we don’t have the same research, we’re not using the same research tools that we did before, with AI, now we’re using very different research tools. We’re looking at different phenomena, and we’re also dealing with different social media. We no longer have the unlimited access that academics used to have, and we have on the other hand much more advanced methods and tools to analyze the data.
Yelena: As we dive further into the digital age. Why do you feel that it’s important for researchers across various disciplines to learn computational techniques?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: So I think interdisciplinary research is very important, and it’s integral to social media studies. Because there are ways that digital anthropologists could look at the results and understand something, versus the ways I can look versus as a political scientist versus as a computer scientist; but bringing everyone to the table and discussing things and working through projects together is where we get the best research, where we get the most robust results, where we also get the most understanding into this phenomenon.
My dissertation advisor is a rhetorician, and she used to always tell me to explain computational methods like I’m explaining them to my dad over the dinner table. And I think that was a great way to think about it, because you’re like, okay, I would explain things differently, but her point was, don’t just say to people ‘I did this’ and show graphs. Actually, explain to people what you did. I always say that’s what makes research better, because getting questions and criticism and input from different fields makes you question things you take for granted, which is very important.
Yelena: Can you share any specific instances where the CRC’s resources or guidance were particularly beneficial?
Dr. Lokmanoglu: I love CRC. The CRC has been very, very helpful and supportive! Helping me work through the grant processes, helping me advise, but also, whenever you need it, it’s always great to have a group of researchers that do similar things. Still, like you said, it has researchers from all across who take very different research approaches. I love that composition about the CRC because I can ask my colleagues in public relations about something, and they’ll tell me to look at a problem from a different angle. And it’s that collaboration of minds that brings forth very strong research. And the feeling of being supported in the community. But also, there are incredible people who, whenever you have any question, go above and beyond to help and walk you through things. A supportive research environment is very important, and the CRC makes you feel supported and makes you feel like your research means something and that you should go on with it. I love being a part of the CRC community.
We thank Ayse for taking the time to chat with us, and look forward to the invaluable contributions that she will make to the field of communication and interdisciplinary research. More information regarding Dr. Lokmanoglu’s professional history and research publications can be found on her LinkedIn and personal website, which is accessible through her faculty profile on the College of Communication website.
