Research
I am a Ph.D. student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am interested in the intersection of several fields, which include areas of journalism and public relations research, media and communication studies, as well as computer science and computational linguistics, which can be broadly described as computational media studies.
I hold a Master of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Arts in Communication Studies from the University of Northern Iowa and a Diploma in Journalism from St.Petersburg State University, Russia.
Computational Media Studies
The concept of computational media studies was born out of several ongoing projects in information retrieval, computational linguistics, communication and mass communication theory. The long-term goal (or the grand idea) is to develop an interdisciplinary area for collaboration between computer scientists and scholars who study media and mass communication (or the information-sharing process involving journalists, media organizations, and the rest of us - through comments, blogs, tweets, facebook wall posts and what not).
Why is this interesting? Because an intersection of media theory and computer science will benefit research in both fields: from simplifying content analysis and upgrading the sample from a dozen publications and a few hundred articles to huge multilingual data sets - to applying findings from agenda-setting, framing and other scholarship to automated opinion mining and sentiment analysis - to using the results of such experiments for further research and theory-building, and better understanding of how people communicate.
Previous Research & Studies
Computer Science
I defended my master’s thesis in computer science in May 2008 at the University of Northern Iowa. My academic advisor was Dr. Eugene Wallingford. My thesis was on specification and code generation of the data layer for data-intensive web applications.
Over the past years, my interests in computer science included software development and code generation, content management systems, Internet-based information retrieval and data mining. Today I am primarily interested in the application of computer science to research in media studies and communication. I am focused on experimenting with methods from a combination of areas, more or less centered on computational linguistics and information retrieval.
More on my involvement in computer science
Communication Studies, Public Relations, Journalism
I defended my master’s thesis in communication studies in December 2007 at the University of Northern Iowa.
My academic advisor was Dr. Dean Kruckeberg. My thesis was on the significance of the general public in a public relations context.
During my studies at the University of Northern Iowa, I was primarily interested in a critical examination of public relations as a field, as well as in applications of computational methods to research in communication. However, back in Russia, where public relations was just being introduced as a new concept, I was interested in all aspects of the field - first as a professional, and later - a researcher and instructor at St. Petersburg State University, where I also earned my Diploma in Journalism.
More on my involvement in communication studies, PR and Journalism
Web Development
Although my work in web development is not research, it served me as a bridge from public relations and communication to computer science and, later, to research.
I have built web sites since 1999, first - as a web designer, then - a programmer. The difference is simple: as a web designer, I’d quickly throw together a design, after which I’d spend night after night trying to figure out some trivial piece of code which rotates images, oh, so neatly. As a programmer, I’d write code which would generate most of the web site automatically – so that I could focus on the really time-consuming tasks, like how to design the damn thing..
Here is a list of my 50+ web-development projects as of February 16, 2009.
