UCLA researchers receive grant to create database of social and mass media

A UCLA research team, led by assistant professor of communication Jungseock Joo, has received $944,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop new approaches to analyzing news data.

Joo and his team, which includes assistant professor of public policy, Zachary Steinert–Threlkeld, and communication professors Francis Steen and Tim Groeling, will develop a framework for integrating massive amounts of data from different social and mass media sources and analyze the data’s text, images, video and audio. The new tool will enable people to learn more about how information is disseminated in the news by identifying topics, actors, events, sentiments and other large-scale patterns within the data.

The team will also collaborate with Jennifer Pan, a social media data specialist from Stanford University for their project.