Digital Research

Faculty in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication perform cutting-edge research in digital media in the areas of social media, data journalism, gender and the digital divide and organizational strategy. Students have the opportunity to work on their own research or collaborate with faculty. Research activities in digital media include:

Dr. Cindy Royal: Dr. Royal's research emphases include the role of data and programming in journalism, experience learning, gender and technology and the pedagogy of digital media. She has had articles published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Social Science Computer Review, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, the Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, Online Journalism Review and MediaShift, and has contributed to textbooks and edited volumes. In 2017, she received funding from the Knight Foundation for the PhDigital Bootcamp, a program to prepare early career faculty to lead innovative curriculum. In 2018, that funding was extended for two additional years. She has received grants in the past for implementing digital innovation in curriculum. More information is available at cindyroyal.com.

Dale Blasingame: During his nine years in television news, Blasingame was an early adopter of social media and encouraged other journalists to see how these social media could dramatically enhance their reporting. Now in the academic world, his research interests cover many of the same grounds. His thesis looked at how Twitter has changed the delivery of breaking news and allowed gatejumpers to bypass the traditional gatekeepers. His article, Gatejumping: Twitter, TV News and the Delivery of Breaking News, appeared in the #ISOJ Journal in 2011. He co-authored the article and multimedia project Data Journalism: An Explication, which was published in the #ISOJ Journal in 2015.

Dr. Kelly Kaufhold: Dr. Kaufhold has a keen interest in the role of age and news habits in informed democracy and is especially interested in where social media fits in that relationship. He is co-editor of the book The Future of News: An Agenda of Perspectives and his research has been published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, Electronic News and International Journal on Media Management. He has also been honored with research awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Dr. Daniel Carter: Dr. Carter's research focuses on how digital platforms shape emerging forms of work, from the use of visualization tools by humanities scholars to low-paid labor on social media platforms. His articles have appeared in Social Media + Society, First Monday, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, the Association of Computing Machinery's proceedings on Human-Computer Interaction and Designing Interactive Systems and elsewhere. He's online at danielcarter.github.io/.