Schieffer Media Insights Lab

Our world is increasingly digital and important ideas, conversations, business, innovation, politics and more are happening online. The three-network broadcast system has long passed away.

The Schieffer Media Insights Lab was created to address how today’s communicators can understand who, what, where, when, why and how audiences – whether sports fans, voting public, company stakeholders, employees, competitors, or others – are thinking, feeling, and behaving.

The lab provides resources and training that students and faculty need to better understand and prepare for today’s questions of how to effectively — and ethically — communicate. The lab serves its students and faculty through cutting edge research through AI-powered social media listening and facial expression analysis.

The lab – located in MOUS 165 – began operation in fall 2023. Dr. Dustin Hahn serves as its inaugural director and is Associate Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media.

Our lab has partnered with the world’s leading industry research providers for social media listening and facial expression software.

Sprinklr is our lab’s leading AI-powered social media listening research platform with industry-leading reliability measurement of audience sentiment analysis. Faculty leverage the platform’s robust and customized data collection capabilities while students may also utilize its unified customer experience management (CXM) tools as they prepare for careers in social media management, marketing, public relations, data analytics, and beyond.

Brandwatch is our lab’s AI-powered social media listening platform with unmatched data visualization and superior user-interface that provides students powerful insights for projects such as analysis of a client’s campaign success. Students may also use competitor analysis dashboards to effectively compare organizations.

iMotions serves as our lab’s audience measurement tool, extending our understanding of online conversations to applied experimental tests of messaging effects on users. While self-report methods serve a purpose in research projects, iMotions allows for noninvasive and objective measures of audience sentiment and emotions both in and out of the lab.

Email Interim Director Julie O’Neil to inquire about project collaboration or faculty training materials.

Media Insights (Taylor’s Version)

To celebrate the release of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)”, we spoke with Andrew Ledbetter, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies, about Taylor Swift and big data.

Continue reading What Big Data Can Tell Us About Fan Interaction on Social Media.

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