News

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

By Tanvi ShahJune 7th, 2019in Homepage

Screenshot courtesy of 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.”

CRC scholars and faculty to present at 69th annual ICA conference

By Susannah BlairMay 20th, 2019in Homepage

Many CRC fellows will be attending the 69th annual International Communication Association conference, which is taking place from May 24th to May 29th in Washington, D.C. COM scholars and faculty will be presenting their recent research projects in interactive poster sessions, panels, and paper sessions.

Below is a list of upcoming ICA presentations by CRC-affiliated professors and doctoral candidates: More

Prof. Patrice Oppliger unpacks the “tweencom girl” genre in latest book

By Susannah BlairApril 26th, 2019in Homepage

Patrice Oppliger’s latest book, Tweencom girls: Gender and adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms, is now available via Rowan & Littlefield.

Dissecting popular Nickelodeon and Disney Channel programs, Oppliger—a CRC fellow and Assistant Professor of Communication at Boston University—offers a critical take on how girls in the transition between pre-teen and teenage have been represented in mainstream children’s television.

Along with extensive examples of various character portrayals over the past 25 years, Oppliger also provides practical advice to parents and educators of young women exposed to this messaging.

“Such an in-depth look at the tweencom genre is long overdue,” writes Nancy Jennings (University of Cincinnati) in a review of the book. “The arguments are rich, and the examples are abundant and deep. Opplinger’s read of female stereotypes and girl power stretches beyond princess culture and provides fresh constructions of key tropes and themes.”

Professor Oppliger’s book is accessible in libraries all over the U.S. and available for purchase here

Can you spot sponsored content? Prof. Michelle Amazeen’s study reveals few of us can

By Susannah BlairMarch 19th, 2019in Homepage

In today's ever-shifting online media landscape, "native advertising"—sponsored content that is integrated into a publication without being readily recognizable as promotional—has become increasingly commonplace across digital news platforms. The question then arises: How do individuals perceive native advertisements and are they able to differentiate them from non-promotional editorial content?

Michelle Amazeen (Assistant Professor in BU's Mass Communication, Advertising, and Public Relations department) and Bartosz Wojdynski (Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Georgia) sought to explore this question in their recently-published paper. Utilizing the Persuasion Knowledge Model as a framework, Amazeen and Wojdynski measured respondents' cognitive responses to sponsored content. The paper, which was funded by the American Press Institute, also incorporates data about how individuals' traits can influence how easily persuaded by native advertising they may be.

The researchers also tested respondents to see if they could correctly identify content that was sponsored—and, their results show, fewer than 1 in 10 could.

Amazeen and Wojdynski write that a contributing factor in whether respondents were able to spot a paid piece of content was how transparent a sponsor was regarding a paid partnership with a publication. Even when they are knowingly looking at a paid piece of content, however, “people are more receptive to what they’re looking at if they know what they’re reading,” Amazeen told BU Today.

The study also found that younger and more educated individuals were more discerning when it came to spotting native ads. But in cases where respondents weren't able to recognize sponsored content, a substantial portion of them reacted negatively once they realized they had been duped.

“I think it’s contributing to people thinking that news media are sharing fake news,” Amazeen explained to BU Today. “Trust in media is at an all-time low…. I’m not suggesting it’s only from native advertising, but I think it’s a contributing factor.”

Sarah Krongard and Prof. Mina Tsay-Vogel receive attention for research on binge-watching and attitude formation

By Tanvi ShahMarch 13th, 2019in Homepage

With digital streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime rapidly expanding their selections of original programming, there is no shortage of opportunities for television fans to “binge” their favorite dramas. But what are the effects of binge-watching behaviors, particularly when the content consumed features graphic violence?

In their recently published scholarly article, Sarah Krongard (Ph.D. candidate in the College of Communication's Division of Emerging Media Studies) and Mina Tsay-Vogel (Associate Professor in the college's Department of Mass Communication, Advertising & Public Relations) draw on empirical research to tackle this question.

"We have control over content, but also technology has control over us," Tsay-Vogel told Boston 25 News in an interview about the research, which explores how exposure to certain television themes relates to individuals’ perceptions of the world. The study examined the violent nature of the most popular binge-watched programs as its focus—Krongard, Tsay-Vogel, and a team of students used quantitative methods to classify the nature and justification of the shows’ on-screen violence.

Exploring a phenomenon known as “mean-world syndrome,” the research team reports that “viewers who spend more time consuming commonly binge-watched online original programming are more likely to see others in the world as mean and less likely to perceive them as altruistic.”

In their article—which has been featured in BU Today, Pacific Standard Magazine, International Business Times and on Boston 25 News—Krongard and Tsay-Vogel also discuss how race and gender can play a role in prejudice formation. They report that the programs analyzed commonly depicted non-white individuals as sexually-threatening while white individuals were more likely to be cast as perpetrators of non-sexual violence.

“In particular, white perpetrators tended to be the ones who were morally justified in their behavior,” Krongard told BU Today. “Non-white perpetrators did not have that privilege.”

Watch the full Boston 25 News segment below:

Prof. Tammy Vigil publishes latest book, “Moms in Chief”

By Susannah BlairJanuary 25th, 2019in Homepage

Closely examining the ways in which the spouses of recent presidential candidates have been presented to and perceived by the American public, CRC research fellow Tammy R. Vigil's new book Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992-2016 takes a critical look at gendered political roles and how they (for better or worse) shape the concept of American womanhood.

"Established gender norms, paired with a deep partisan divide, make it difficult for candidates’ spouses to embrace the full complexities of their own identities due to the fear of possibly alienating segments of the population and costing their mate valuable votes," explains Vigil in a Q&A with the University Press of Kansas blog.

When interviewed by BU Today ,Vigil explained that today's presidential spouses have a lot in common with ancient Sparta. "It makes sense. They're being looked at as wives because they are married to the nominee. But when I started looking through that lens, it really explained why people as diverse as Elizabeth Dole and Cindy McCain were embracing this idea of: Look at me, I'm the deferential wife and I'm the good mother. Elizabeth Dole didn't even have kids and she was still playing that sort of role."

In particular, Vigil dissects the ideology of "republican motherhood"—which upholds the traditional ideal of a subservient, domestic, self-sacrificing "female patriot"—and analyzes how this limited public imagining restricts women's autonomy as citizens independent from their male partners. Regardless of where on the political spectrum their spouses' politics may fall, Vigil says, wives of presidential candidates have all been held to this stereotypical standard.

"Unless reporters and campaign strategists expand their perceptions of the spouses (particularly wives), the coverage of candidates’ mates will likely remain as it has for the past several decades," Vigil explains. "Wives will be expected to conform to traditional gender norms and will be evaluated based on their ability and willingness to meet these conventional expectations."

Update, September 8, 2019: An excerpt from Moms in Chief was featured on The Daily Beast, link

Purchase Moms in Chief, published by University Press Kansas, here.

Professors Ray Kotcher and Arunima Krishna discuss results of Bellwether Survey on PRWeek Podcast

By Susannah BlairJanuary 11th, 2019in Homepage

The Bellwether Survey is, by most measures, an ambitious undertaking. "We think this might be the biggest study of its type," explained The PRWeek's Steve Barrett on the podcast's January 11 episode.

The collaborative project between PRWeek and Boston University aimed to gain insight into the state of the communications field by polling individuals with firsthand experience in the industry—in total, researchers received responses from 1,500 public relations professionals.

"We do say that this is one of the biggest studies, if not the biggest study, and most comprehensive studies of the PR profession ever done," said Arunima Krishna, assistant professor of PR at BU's College of Communication.

But, Krishna says, the Bellwether Survey is unprecedented in its scope as well as size. Researchers crafted 72 questions spanning a wide range of topics to take stock of the PR community's views on the state of the industry and their predictions for its future—which, for many researchers and practitioners, appears rife with challenges. More

Prof. Deborah Jaramillo publishes her new book, “The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry”

By minatvSeptember 24th, 2018in Homepage

Revisiting early debates about TV content and censorship from industry and government perspectives, The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry recounts the development of the Television Code, the TV counterpart to the Hays Motion Picture Production Code.

The broadcasting industry’s trade association, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), sought to sanitize television content via its self-regulatory document, the Television Code. The Code covered everything from the stories, images, and sounds of TV programs (no profanity, illicit sex and drinking, negative portrayals of family life and law enforcement officials, or irreverence for God and religion) to the allowable number of commercial minutes per hour of programming. It mandated that broadcasters make time for religious programming and discouraged them from charging for it. And it called for tasteful and accurate coverage of news, public events, and controversial issues.

Using archival documents from the Federal Communications Commission, NBC, the NAB, and a television reformer, Senator William Benton, this book explores the run-up to the adoption of the 1952 Television Code from the perspectives of the government, TV viewers, local broadcasters, national networks, and the industry’s trade association. Dr. Deborah Jaramillo analyzes the competing motives and agendas of each of these groups as she builds a convincing case that the NAB actually developed the Television Code to protect commercial television from reformers who wanted more educational programming, as well as from advocates of subscription television, an alternative distribution model. By agreeing to self-censor content that viewers, local stations, and politicians found objectionable, Dr. Jaramillo concludes, the NAB helped to ensure that commercial broadcast television would remain the dominant model for decades to come.

Check out "Six Things We Weren’t Supposed to Know about Early TV Viewers" compiled by Dr. Jaramillo.

About the Author
Deborah L. Jaramillo is an associate professor of television studies at Boston University. She is the author of Ugly War, Pretty Package: How CNN and FOX News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept.

BU Research Team Awarded $1,000,000 NSF Grant to Analyze Public Communication

By minatvSeptember 13th, 2018in Homepage

Dr. Lei Guo (Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies) and other BU faculty including, Dr. Margrit Betke (Professor of Computer Science), Dr. Derry Wijaya (Assistant Professor of Computer Science), and Dr. Prakash Ishwar (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering) have been awarded $1,000,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their proposal titled, BIGDATA: IA: Multiplatform, Multilingual, and Multimodal Tools for Analyzing Public Communication in over 100 Languages.

This research project will involve collecting multilingual, multiplatform, and multimodal corpora of text and images originating in the U.S. and reported worldwide, developing an interactive budget-efficient methodology for annotation by experts and crowdworkers that scales effectively, using machine learning and deep learning techniques that exploit multilingual and multimodal representations to develop data analytics tools for entity and frame recognition, sentiment analysis of entities and frames, and curating balanced real-time content collections for many languages. This project is expected to generate analytical tools for social scientists and others to better examine the international flow of public communications. The annotated data will provide training and benchmark datasets that can propel research in entity and frame recognition, sentiment analysis, and other related natural language processing tasks for many languages.

The full abstract and award notification is available at the NSF website.

The work on this award is coordinated through the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Media (AIEM) team. AIEM is research group at Boston University is to conduct research and foster education in areas related to artificial intelligence and emerging media. They explore and create techniques from machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision to interpret emerging media, their role in mass and interpersonal communication, and understand the human and automated processes by which emerging media are developed, marketed, shaped and reshaped by users.

BU AIEM is housed in the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering and is part of BU’s Artificial Intelligence (AIR) Initiative. Their team members are affiliated with various colleges and departments throughout Boston University, including the College of Arts and Sciences (Department of Computer Science), the College of Communication (Division of Emerging Media), and the College of Engineering (Department of Computer Engineering).