New book by CRC fellow Charlotte Howell, “Divine Programming,” to be released April 2020

From the mid-90s to the present, television drama with religious content has come to reflect the growing cultural divide between white middle-America and concentrated urban elites. As author Charlotte E. Howell argues in this forthcoming book, by 2016, television narratives of white Christianity had become entirely disconnected from the religion they were meant to represent. Programming labeled "family-friendly" became a euphemism for white, middlebrow America, and developing audience niches became increasingly significant to serial dramatic television. Utilizing original case studies and interviews, Divine Programming investigates the development, writing, producing, marketing, and positioning of key series including 7th Heaven, Friday Night Lights, Rectify, Supernatural, Jane the Virgin, Daredevil, and Preacher. 

As this book shows, there has historically been a deep ambivalence among television production cultures regarding religion and Christianity more specifically. It illustrates how middle-American television audiences lost significance within the Hollywood television industry and how this, in turn, has informed and continues to inform television programming on a larger scale. In recent years, upscale audience niches have aligned with the perceived tastes of affluent, educated, multicultural, and-importantly-secular elites. As a result, the televised representation of white Christianity had to be othered and shifted into the unreality of fantastic genres to appeal to niche audiences. To examine this effect, Howell looks at religious representation through four approaches—establishment, distancing, displacement, and use—and looks at series across a variety of genres and outlets in order to provide varied analyses of each theme.

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Charlotte E. Howell is an Assistant Professor of Television Studies in the Department of Film and Television and a research fellow of the CRC. Her work has been published in the Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Television, Networking Knowledge, Kinephanos, and in the anthology Supernatural, Humanity, and the Soul: On the Highway to Hell and Back.

AEJMC 2019 presentations by BU COM faculty and students

This week, communication scholars, practitioners, and educators from around the world are congregating in Toronto, Canada for the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)'s 102nd annual conference. Many members of the BU COM community—including some of the CRC's research fellows—will be in attendance to share their scholarly work and convene with colleagues around this year's theme, "Investing in Our Futures."

Below is a list of AEJMC conference presentations and panels featuring BU COM and CRC-affiliated faculty and doctoral candidates (click image to view full-size):

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CRC fellows Lei Guo and Chris Wells featured in BU Today’s series “Big Data, Big Impact”

As Boston University begins to invest its resources and expertise in the emergent field broadly referred to as "big data," BU Today has published a multipart series exploring the promises, consequences, and future of data science. Part Five of this series—titled "Big Data, Big Impact"—features insights from two of the CRC's faculty fellows, Lei Guo (Assistant Professor, Emerging Media Studies) and Chris Wells (Assistant Professor, Journalism). 

Both Guo and Wells have worked extensively with big data, both as a research method and as a topic of interest in and of itself. Their research utilizes computational methods to explore online media phenomena such as fake news, filter bubbles, and the influence of algorithms on news consumption.

Full story available on the BU Today website: "What You Read and Watch is Changing Media Forever"

An artifact from the CRC’s early days—our first-ever newsletter

Recently, the Communication Research Center received an unexpected and exciting email. Attached was a scanned copy of the first-ever CRC newsletter, published in November of 1959 (the year the CRC was established).

We are so thrilled to have this documentation of the CRC's rich history and hope you enjoy learning about the center's early research endeavors as much as we have.

Many thanks to John W. Holman for getting in touch and mailing us the original document, which will be framed and displayed at the CRC.

Learn more about the history of the CRC (article by Dr. Michael G. Elasmar)

Dr. Melvin DeFleur honored with AEJMC’s Distinguished Service to Research Award

Dr. Melvin DeFleur, a former professor of communication at Boston University and renowned communications scholar, was posthumously awarded the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)'s Eleanor Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award. 

Dr. DeFleur conducted pioneering academic research in the communications field, authoring over a dozen books—including the widely-cited textbook “Theories of Mass Communication," which has been translated in 10 languages. At Boston University, he served as both a faculty member and chair of COM's Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations department. In 2011, the Communication Research Center created the Dr. Melvin DeFleur Distinguished Lecture Series, a tribute to his groundbreaking contributions to mass communication research and his valued membership at the CRC. 

The award will be presented during the AEJMC's August 2019 Conference in Toronto, Canada.

Prof. Jim Cummings’ “screenomics” research featured in The New York Times

A New York Times article about the changing nature of our digital experiences cites a recently-published paper in Human-Computer Interaction co-authored by the CRC's Jim Cummings.

The concept of "screen time" has been long used to understand how—and for how long—individuals interact with their devices. But as more applications have become available to internet users, understanding people's digital experiences and how often they switch between tasks has become more complicated.

"Consider what a person can do in just the time it takes to wait for a bus: text, watch a comedy skit, play a video game, buy concert tickets, take five selfies, each with a different set of cartoon ears," explains The New York Times' Benedict Carey. 

As a response to this newfound complexity and fragmentation of experience, Cummings and his co-researchers documented, via screenshots, the digital activity of 30 participants. The resulting digital records, they write, are best conceived of as "screenomes"—adapted from the word "genome."

Researchers reported that, on average, participants switched from one screen activity to another every 20 seconds and spent hardly 20 minutes on one continuous activity. Their findings were presented as a stream of color-coded graphs (shown at left) depicting what kind of activities individuals used their screens for—entertainment, news, or work, for instance—and how they switched between these tasks.

Quoted in The New York Times' piece, co-author Byron Reeves (Professor of Communication at Stanford University) explained the significance of their proposed "screenomic" framework.

“It’s very counterintuitive to say at this stage, but the fact is, no one really knows what the heck people are seeing on their screens. To understand what’s happening, we need to know what exactly that is.”