Each semester, the UConn Department of Communication welcomes expert guest lecturers to share insights and research from across the field of communication.
Cuihua (Cindy) Shen – Thursday, April 10, 2025
Talk Description
Visual misinformation, including manipulated, synthetic, or out-of-context images and videos, is increasingly common in AI-mediated information environments. Due to the superior impression, retention, virality, and persuasiveness of visuals, visual misinformation poses a significant threat to national security, social cohesion, and public health. Yet, we still know very little about how users process and judge the authenticity of visuals, and the ways in which platforms and fact-checking agencies can effectively detect and combat visual misinformation. In this talk, I will report findings from several recent studies on the perception, mechanisms, and interventions of visual misinformation and suggest future research directions to mitigate information manipulation and restore trust in the age of generative AI.
Bio
Cuihua (Cindy) Shen is a professor of communication at UC Davis and the co-founder of the Computational Communication Research lab (c2.ucdavis.edu) and the Computational Multi-Modal Communication Lab (https://sites.google.com/view/cmmclab). Her recent research focuses on computational social science and multimodal (mis)information in AI-mediated environments. She is the past chair of the Computational Methods Division of the International Communication Association, and the founding associate editor of the journal Computational Communication Research, as well as the associate editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The National Science Foundation and Facebook have funded her research. She is an ICA Fellow, a recipient of a Fulbright US Scholar Award, and has received numerous top paper awards from ICA.
Dr. Deen Freelon – Thursday, March 13th, 2025
Talk Description
In 2018, I published a short essay titled “Computational Research in the Post-API Age” in the journal Political Communication. Its goals were simple: to warn computational researchers in the social sciences that the days of free and easily accessible digital communication data were coming to an end, and to start a conversation about how to respond. The essay was initially inspired by the prohibition of automated data collection from Facebook’s Graph API, which occurred in March 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This corporate decision effectively eliminated most authorized means of collecting Facebook data (except those involving direct collaboration with Meta researchers) until the Crowdtangle service was opened to academic researchers in the summer of 2020. Meta shelved Crowdtangle in August 2024, replacing it with the Meta Content Library, another data access regime. Other social platforms, including Twitter/X, Reddit, and TikTok, have also substantially modified their data access policies over the years.
Some of the issues I raised in my Political Communication essay are still relevant today, while others are less so. I failed entirely to address still other major developments in access to digital data over the ensuing years. This presentation, based on a commissioned journal article, will build on my earlier piece in three ways: first, it will recount a concise history of social media data access, informed by official documentation and my own professional observations as one of the first Communication researchers to analyze social media data computationally. Second, it will sketch the present state of digital communication data access in context with past such “ages,” making practical recommendations and generally characterizing the moment for posterity. The third section will be devoted to the future, but instead of making predictions, it will adopt a normative approach, advocating for corporate and governmental data access policies that balance the researcher’s interest in data usability, the public’s interests in privacy and impactful research, and business interests in transparency and good corporate citizenship.
Bio
Deen Freelon is a Presidential Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. A widely recognized expert on digital politics and computational social science, he has authored or coauthored over 60 book chapters, funded reports, and articles in journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of the first communication researchers to apply computational methods to social media data and has developed eight open-source research software packages. The first of these, ReCal, is a free online intercoder reliability service that has been running continuously since 2008, when it was developed by the author as a Ph.D. student, and is used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide. He has been awarded over $6 million in research funding from grantmakers, including the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
He was a founding member and remains a Senior Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of five academic research centers in the Knight Research Network (established in 2019) to receive its highest level of funding. His research and commentary have been featured in press outlets including the Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Vox, USA Today, the BBC, PBS NewsHour, CBS News, NBC News, and many others. Unlike many computational social scientists, he centers questions of identity and power in his work, paying particular attention to race, gender, and ideology.
Freelon earned a B.A. with honors from Stanford University in 2002, and his M.A. (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) from the University of Washington. Before coming to Penn, he held tenured positions at American University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His endowed chair is named after his great-grandfather, Allan Randall Freelon Sr., an acclaimed Philadelphia fine artist and art educator who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924 with a B.A. in education.
Dr. Daniel “Danny” Pimentel – Thursday, March 6th, 2025
Talk Description
Spatial computing tools, such as augmented reality (AR), are revolutionizing how audiences connect with distant communities, creating the illusion of a direct experience with virtual people and places. In this talk, Danny will share insights from his ongoing projects with industry collaborators, such as Meta and Snap, that utilize AR-based storytelling for social impact. He’ll also showcase practical, no-code tools and workflows that empower researchers and creatives to design and test their own AR experiences—no technical background required.
Bio
Danny Pimentel is an Assistant Professor of Immersive Media Psychology, Fellow at Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication, and co-Director of the Oregon Reality Lab at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. As a developer and researcher, Danny creates and tests the pro-environmental and prosocial implications of immersive storytelling through augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). His projects have been supported by Meta, Snapchat, Unity 3D, Google AR Core, and National Geographic, and his work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Scientific Reports, New Media and Society, and Journal of Nature Conservation, among others.
