Research

This study investigates the potential for integrating AI and journalistic networks to create real-time, priority-driven maps of infrastructure damage during natural disasters. Focusing on Hurricane Florence in 2018, we collected over a million tweets using the REST Twitter API and extracted 11,638 images for analysis. Tweets were categorized by source, including news organizations and citizen journalists. We applied the OpenAI CLIP unsupervised machine learning model for image classification, splitting the data into 80 % for training, 10 % for validation, and 10% for testing. The model achieved an average precision of 92 %, recall of 78 %, and an F1 score of 85 %. When compared to other models such as ViT and DeiT, which achieved F1 scores of 82.9 and 81.2, respectively, CLIP performed similarly but stood out due to its accessibility and zero-shot learning capabilities, making it ideal for rapid deployment in newsrooms and crisis scenarios. The framework's success was further demonstrated by cross-referencing model predictions with geotagged metadata and journalist sources, which linked damage locations with credible information. By leveraging this AI-based framework, journalists can significantly reduce the time needed to identify disaster-response targets, helping to focus relief and recovery efforts in real time. This approach enhances disaster data collection, analysis, and dissemination, ultimately saving lives and reducing harm by providing more efficient and accurate damage assessments. The study highlights how AI and journalistic networks can collaborate to improve crisis response efforts.

Big Tobacco and other stakeholders, such as vape shops and smaller e-cigarette manufacturers, have adapted traditional tobacco marketing techniques to digital platforms. Warning labels are essential for informing consumers about the potential harms of tobacco use, including e-cigarettes. However, in a rapidly changing digital landscape, social media platform policies often lag behind, leaving digital marketing largely unchecked. This has allowed Big Tobacco to modernize traditional cigarette marketing in the digital sphere with e-cigarettes, a phenomenon we term ‘remediated marketing’. Without adequate warning labels, exposure to tobacco promotion may increase e-cigarette use among youth, who engage with social media at particularly high rates. This article presents a rule-based classifier developed to detect warning labels in TikTok and YouTube videos by combining computer vision technology with rule-based classification. Our classifier achieved 97.33% accuracy in detecting posts with warning labels. However, only 2.32% of YouTube video frames (240 out of 10,344 frames) and 1.32% of TikTok video frames (61 out of 4639 frames) contained warning labels, suggesting that warning messages are infrequent across e-cigarette content on platforms popular among youth, including TikTok and YouTube. Among the detected warning labels, there was notable diversity in wording and length, indicating a lack of standardization. Additionally, within YouTube and TikTok video frames, 63.7% and 30.0% of the warnings appeared in the first five seconds of the videos, respectively. These results highlight the need for improved policies and standardized warning labels to better protect young adults from e-cigarette promotion on social media.

In this blog post, Lamia Zia grapples with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, especially in Washington, D.C. 

Zia works to answer questions such as, "What does sub human–machine collaboration actually look like? How does this partnership between humans and technology take form beyond theory and imagination? From human–machine relations to international relations, how will this emerging partnership between humans and intelligent systems reshape the theory and practice of diplomacy, negotiation, mediation, and global dialogue? Will this partnership deepen cross-border understanding, or will it risk reducing the subtle art of diplomacy to a mere exchange of data, algorithms, and calculated logic?"

She argues that robots might mediate disputes over resources or climate policy with impartial accuracy, while humans interpret the emotional undercurrents, the trust, hesitation, and hope that no algorithm can fully quantify. 

Rhetorica Rising introduces a range of feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies that can help us understand social justice movements, past and present.

The collection highlights how the field of rhetorical studies has evolved over the past decade, taking up the challenge of creating intersectional feminist scholarship that engages with BlPOC histories and rhetorics, decolonial rhetorics, digital studies, disability studies, queer studies, transnational studies, and discourses regarding reproductive justice.

Be sure to check out the chapter, "What Should We Ask? Feminist Methodological Inquiries into Commemoration," by Dr. Carly Woods (Communication) and Dr. Jessica Enoch (English)! The book was edited by Eileen E. Schell, K.J. Rawson, Curtis J. Jewell, Abigail H. Long, Sidney Turner, and Gabriella Wilson.

Omoleye Adeyemi recently published a book review of Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age by Raven Maragh-Lloyd. Adeyemi explains that Black Networked Resistance explores the use of rearticulation to amplify the methods utilized by Black individuals against white power structures. This book enables readers to conceptualize the factors of media that we engage with and how those factors are rearticulations of past concepts that have been used. 

Adeyemi's review was published in Communication and Race. 

Lamia Zia's new blog post for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy explores the power of public sphere through a reflection on espresso and cafes. Zia discusses coffee's diplomatic power and how it operates as an ambassador of culture in this intriguing read!

As Digital Cultures becomes the dominant term used by many across a variety of intellectual fields to describe the social, aesthetic, and political impact of digital media, it is necessary to provide a reference volume that specifies and defines the bounds of scholarly debates and curricular outlines for an otherwise amorphous interdisciplinary space.

This handbook provides a comprehensive reference for the varied methodologies, historical frames, and theoretical perspectives essential for the study of Digital Cultures today. In outlining these foundations, it serves as a practical guide for educators and students into the broad range of perspectives grouped together for the critical, historical, and social scientific study of digital media.

It also looks into the future and outlines an agenda for future research by examining not only the origins of the concept of Digital Culture, but emerging topics and themes still in development, such as the relation between digital technology and climate change, artificial intelligence and knowledge, sensation and aesthetics, and the rise of new infrastructures reinventing not only the built environment, but the boundaries of nations and sovereignty.

• The first handbook to provide the historical, theoretical, and methodological foundations for the study of Digital Culture
• Contributions by leading scholars in the field
• Discusses emerging themes and areas of research 

With the rapid advancements in technology over the past 2 decades, it has become crucial to understand people’s attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and its associated risks. Given the increasing access to the AI technologies, it is imperative to examine how young people in non-Western societies like Pakistan perceive AI risks and benefits. We conducted an online survey of 435 college students who had used AI technology in the past 6 months. The results of our study indicate that the majority of college students view AI technology positively and perceive it as an opportunity to enhance workplace productivity. In addition, most of the respondents are optimistic about the future applications of AI in their individual lives and society. This research contributes to the literature on how college students in Pakistan perceive AI in their daily lives and offer implications for future scholars interested in studying AI technology use in non-Western countries.

The work of Brazilian Black feminist Lélia Gonzalez challenges ideas of Latin America that privilege Europeanness by reimagining it as Améfrica Ladina. In this brief essay, I delve into Gonzalez’s interconnected concepts of amerifricanidade (Amefricanity) and Améfrica Ladina. Both notions defy Latinidad’s epistemological hegemony in rhetoric and communication studies at large by centering the colonial struggles and resulting knowledge of Indigenous people and Amefricans in the region. Lélia Gonzalez’s legacy could transform scholarship that invokes Latinidad, encouraging scholars to embrace instead our ladinidad as a vital step toward decolonizing the discipline.

Ghana’s lithium deal with Barari DV in 2023 sparked discussions among various stakeholders. The “sticky” nature of the agreement revived political conversations across many online platforms. Dr. Nana Kwame Osei Fordjour, Inusah Mohammed, and Anani Yao Kuwornu examined how users engaged in online discussions about the agreement through the lenses of deliberative discourses and incivility for Communicatio: “Uncivil Discourses, Online Comments, and Politics: A Case Study of Discussions Surrounding Ghana’s Lithium Deal.” 

Their research highlights the potential influence of online forums on shaping political dialogue and democratic participation in Africa, revealing both their strengths and drawbacks.