Northwestern University
COMM_ST 101-1 · Undergraduate lecture · Required course
This course is the first part of a two-quarter sequence required for communication studies majors and taken in the first year of study. This quarter, we will explore Communication Studies as a broad and interdisciplinary field, examining key domains, processes, and perspectives on understanding communication phenomena. Along the way, we will go over practical media and computing literacy skills that are fundamental to understanding communication in today's media ecosystem.
COMM_ST 379 / POLI_SCI 390 · Undergraduate lecture
Digital media and technologies, often considered liberation technology, have increasingly been employed by governments and non-political entities for political propaganda and repression. This course will examine the practices and implications of propaganda and repression within the digital media landscape. We will explore the role of digital media and technologies in authoritarian regimes, the common strategies and applications of digital propaganda and repression, and consider how various actors implement these tactics, along with their consequences and global impacts. Through course readings, in-class discussions, and student-led projects, students will develop a critical understanding of the interplay between digital media, politics, and civil society.
MTS 501 · Ph.D. seminar · Required course
The goal of this seminar is to introduce first-year students in the MTS and TSB Ph.D. programs to foundational and current research in these fields and key challenges involved in pursuing an impactful, responsible, and fulfilling research career. Throughout the quarter, students in the seminar will: (1) engage with program faculty and former graduate students and their respective research; (2) discuss and assess various aspects of research career practices and strategies; (3) develop and apply your own effective research career development strategies. We will approach the course through a combination of readings, writings, in-class discussions, and guest visits from TSB and MTS program faculty as well as former graduate students.
MTS 525 · Ph.D. seminar
Digital technologies have prompted communication researchers to leverage massive digital datasets and computational tools to better understand the digital social environment. This research seminar offers an overview of key computational methods in social science research, with a focus on computational content analysis of large-scale digital data. We will explore main methods and techniques for digital data collection, machine learning, and the analysis of large-scale textual, visual, audio, and multimodal data. The course also examines current opportunities and challenges arising from recent computational breakthroughs, such as large language models (LLMs). Through engagement with key scholarship, hands-on programming tutorials, and research projects, students will gain a conceptual understanding of computational methods, receive practical training in integrating computational tools into their research, and develop a critical perspective on computational communication research.
Computational methods have reshaped social science research, providing unprecedented tools for analyzing massive datasets spanning different modalities (text, image, audio, video), platforms, and contexts. If you are interested in learning computational multimodal analysis, these resources could be helpful: a book chapter with Yilang Peng on how to use computational visual analysis to study political communication; and a book chapter that I wrote with Kaiping Chen on how to systematically analyze large-scale video data for communication research.
R is a functional open-source programming language widely used in statistical analysis and visualization. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. Learning R may not be easy at the beginning, but once you get into it, you can explore more powerful things with R. If you are interested in learning R programming, these resources could be helpful: an instruction I wrote for my students in Communication Research Methods at Stanford covering installation and getting familiar with R and RStudio; practice code that beginners can run line by line, from setting a working directory to creating simple plots; and Swirl, an interactive R package for learning R programming and data science in a fun way.