On Wednesday October 12, 2022, four new tenure-track faculty members, who joined SC&I in September 2022, presented their research to the school community during the fall New Faculty Colloquium, an annual event held virtually this year.
The faculty members are: Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science Jessica Yi-Yun Cheng; Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Youngrim Kim; Associate Professor of Communication Kristina Scharp; and Assistant Professor of Communication Sarah Shugars.
Following the event, Interim Dean Dafna Lemish wrote to the SC&I community in an email, “Thank you to all of the presenters, and to over 70 members of our community who attended. What great new energy and innovative research and teaching to incorporate into SC&I. Welcome Jessica, Youngrim, Kristina, and Sarah!”
Overview of the Research Presentations
Cheng is an assistant professor of Library and Information Science. Her current research focuses on investigating interoperability issues in taxonomies and metadata that may have implications for data curation. Her work leverages conceptual modeling, qualitative reasoning, and logic-based methods for merging and aligning geographic and biodiversity taxonomies.
During her presentation, “Taxonomy Alignment and Provenance Research in Biodiversity,” Cheng said her book, co-authored with Dr. Rhiannon Bettivia (Simmons University) and Dr. Gryk (UConn) “Documenting the Future: Navigating Provenance Metadata Standards,” will be published next fall.
Describing her research, Cheng said provenance has traditionally been thought of as history, or as origin, for example, the chain of custody of a piece of art. Who owns or possesses it is what Cheng refers to as “Retrospective Provenance” as opposed to “Prospective Provenance” which looks at future ownership, or how things will come to be through the application of assembly instructions/plans/directions.
Cheng's current research focuses on investigating interoperability issues in taxonomies and metadata that may have implications for data curation.
As an example of Prospective Provenance, Cheng used an example from the Nintendo video game Animal Crossing, in which the players are provided recipes to build their own furniture and tools on an island. During the assembly process, Cheng explained, people use directions for putting the furniture together which are similar to a cooking recipe. This workflow is part of the temporal spectrum of provenance.
Cheng then explained that something is missing in terms of provenance when describing this assembly process, and it is what she and her collaborators call “Subjective Provenance.” “When it comes to provenance research,” Cheng said, “we ask questions such as, what could happen? This is what we call ‘Subjunctive Provenance,’ which is understanding what could have been, based upon the many possible paths a step could have led to (such as by following or not following the exact directions provided by the Animal Crossing recipes) or making room for innovation and creativity in the assembly process. Cheng said her solution to understanding Subjunctive Provenance further is to study taxonomy alignment and misalignment in biodiversity contexts.
Through her research, Cheng has introduced and applied a novel approach in aligning taxonomies (logic-based methods); investigated the impact of taxonomies and metadata in biodiversity data in ways that haven’t been thought about before (temporal & geographic); and she has discovered novel temporal dimensions of provenance research.
Kim is an assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies. Kim studies the role of digital platforms and data-driven systems in relation to state institutions and governance. She examines how state institutions build and utilize digital technologies to manage complex governance challenges, especially in cases of imminent public health or environmental crises; how crisis response technologies reconfigure state-society relations; and how crisis response technologies developed for public interest reconfigure state/society relations in moments of risk, uncertainty, and disturbance.
During her presentation, Kim said she seeks to understand two critical questions: How do state institutions build and utilize digital platforms and data infrastructures to manage complex governance challenges, and how do these technologies reconfigure state-society relationships.
Kim seeks to understand two critical questions: How do state institutions build and utilize digital platforms and data infrastructures to manage complex governance challenges, and how do these technologies reconfigure state-society relationships.
In this context, Kim said she is currently working on three research projects. The first is her book project that concerns the politics of data surrounding new technologies developed for pandemic response and is called “Pandemic Data Publics: Surveillance Culture and Civic Action in Times of Public Health Emergencies.” To conduct her research Kim spent 16 months in South Korea examining the country’s response to MERS and COVID-19.
The second project is multidisciplinary, comparative research on COVID dashboard builders which she collaborates with other scholars in the U.S. and India. Kim is also planning her next project on transboundary air pollution and the climate crisis in South Korea and China, which is currently titled, “Racialized Air, Aerial Media, and Feminist Digital Practices.”
Scharp is an associate professor of Communication. Scharp’s research meets at the intersection of interpersonal, family, and health communication with a particular focus on difficult family transitions and the process of marginalization. She most often examines marginalization in the contexts of relational/family distancing, complicated health diagnoses, and disenfranchised student populations.
During her presentation, titled “How Communication Processes Address Inequity and Marginalization,” Scharp said her program of research is about marginalized populations, specifically how they traverse the difficult transitions and cope with the major disruptions of their lives. She thus has three overarching goals: examining structures of oppression; understanding how those ideologies and structures marginalize and stigmatize people; and how people respond to these forces in resilient ways and how they cope with the associated outcomes of their disenfranchisement.
Scharp said her program of research is about marginalized populations, specifically how they traverse the difficult transitions and cope with the major disruptions of their lives.
The three processes Scharp focuses on are re-making, resistance, and resilience. “Re-making is taking away the taking-for-granted assumptions that foster inequity. Resistance is challenging those structures and looking at the ways people give voice to alternatives and how they resist the structures that stigmatize them. Resilience is about understanding how these marginalized and disenfranchised communities respond in ways that move them forward,” she said.
Scharp examines these processes across three main areas: interpersonal (such as disenfranchised student populations and migrants) family (e.g., family distancing and foster/adoption), and health communication (e.g., mental health and disability diagnoses).
Shugars is an assistant professor of Communication. They study how everyday people talk about, engage with, and collectively shape the modern world around them. Bringing together computational communication and the principles of deliberative democracy, they develop new text and network methods to examine the relational nature of public life, the linguistic modes through which people express themselves, and the technological affordances which shape digital discourse.
During their presentation, which focused on three lines of their current research, “Improving Digital Discourse, Collaborative Reasoning Through Communication, and Methodological Validity in Communication Research,” they said their research falls under three areas of study: “The first addresses the question of how we can improve digital discourse, under the assumption there might be room for improvement here, focusing on what affordances of social media can help or hinder social discourse; the second is thinking about the process of collaborative reasoning, examining how people communicate their reasoning for their political opinions and how they communicate their beliefs and opinions, and how people interact with each other as they express their views; and the third strand looks at the methodological validity of these approaches, specifically looking at how we can better conceptualize and operationalize communication phenomena in the context of a digital world.”
Shugars studies how everyday people talk about, engage with, and collectively shape the modern world around them.
They are currently teaching a class called Communication, Technology, and Society. Regarding their service contributions, they said, “I care deeply about building academic spaces as spaces that are inclusive, and welcoming, and supportive of all people. I am particularly interested in fostering computational spaces where people from historically marginalized communities are welcomed and included.”
Shugars is a member of the DEI Committee for ICA Computational Methods and for the last five years they have been a co-founder and co-organizer of the Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) Conference.
Discover more about the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.
