International Journal of Communication: Special Issue Call for Papers: “Presidential Debates Across the Americas: Analyzing Candidate Performance in Hybrid Media Settings” Guest editors: Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin Madison Martin Echeverría, Autonomous University of …
Social Media and Democracy
MCRC Researchers Share Work on Simulating Opinion Dynamics with LLMs
MCRC researchers, Dhavan Shah and Sijia Yang, joined with colleagues in psychology and computer science to publish two proceedings on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate opinion dynamics. This work will be …
SMAD Researcher Publish on Shifting Coverage of Sexual Violence Amid #MeToo
In their new article, “From Weinstein to Kavanaugh: Shifting Coverage of Sexual Violence and the #MeToo Movement Across U.S. News Media,” a team of researchers from Social Media and Democracy examined how news coverage and …
MCRC Research Team Awarded Research Forward Grant for Artificial Intelligence Terrarium
A team of researchers from the Mass Communication Research Center has been awarded the Research Forward grant to assist in the completion of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Terrarium. The team consists of Jack M. McLeod …
Professor Dhavan Shah Awarded WARF Named Professorship
Dhavan Shah, Maier-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication has been named the Jack M. McLeod Professor of Communication Research through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Named Professorship award. The WARF named professorship …
SMAD Team Finds Thematic, Event and Temporal Expression Polarization
The SMAD team studied patterns of polarized expression on social media and found that it could be categorized into three groups that not only explain existing concepts about polarization but speak to the deep partisan divide.
New article from SMAD “‘Think Global, Act Local’: How #MeToo Hybridized Across Borders and Platforms for Contextual Relevance”
The Social Media and Democracy group examines the #MeToo movement through a global lens and demonstrates how the movement differs across language groups and social media platforms.
New article “Building an ICCN Multimodal Classifier of Aggressive Political Debate Style: Towards a Computational Understanding of Candidate Performance Over Time”
The Social Media and Democracy Group addresses the challenge of micro-coding aggressive political debate styles by developing a multimodal classifier that incorporates video and audio features with speech coding of candidate debate performance.
Team receives $5 million award to continue research on misinformation correction
The award will allow researchers to further develop Course Correct, a precision tool providing journalists with guidance against misinformation. MADISON, Wis. – A team of researchers that developed Course Correct, a tool to help journalists …
New article from SMAD “Vaccine discourse during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: Topical structure and source patterns”
In the new article “Vaccine discourse during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: Topical structure and source patterns informing efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy” in PLoS One, the Social Media and Democracy group extracted a …