The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2023-2024 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professors Nora Webb Williams and JungHwan Yang of the Department of Political Science and Department of Communications respectively.
Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and who plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.
Prof. Webb Williams is extending her 2022-23 project by continuing to use Cline Center news archives, databases, and text-as-data expertise to study the ties between elite actors in authoritarian regimes. The main focus is on post-Soviet countries, primarily Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. The project will extract instances of positive and negative interactions between elites to predict regime-level outcomes such as coup d'état attempts. The work will involve developing new text-as-data tools and applying them to historical media coverage available at the Cline Center.
Prof. Yang’s research project aims to understand the media's coverage patterns of real-world events, with a primary focus on mass shootings and police shootings. There is a notable trend in media where only a handful of events receive predominant coverage, leaving numerous others underrepresented or completely ignored. This study seeks to illuminate any inherent biases in news production, specifically by examining the criteria determining news selection and presentation. To address this question, this project aims to identify specific mass shooting incidents as they appear in the media through the Cline Center’s Global News Index. This process entails correlating distinct shooting events with their corresponding media reports and identifying various characteristics related to news and its media sources.