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LA Social Science 2021 Summer Course Previews: Integrated Marketing Communications with Prof. Feramisco

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As Summer 2021 approaches, LA Social Science will be highlighting some of the summer courses being offered within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA.

UCLA Summer Courses are open to BOTH UCLA Students and NON-UCLA Students. All Summer 2021 courses will be offered online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can enroll as long as you are 15 years of age or older by the first day of summer and you do NOT have to be enrolled in an academic institution in order to participate in UCLA Summer Sessions. For more information, click HERE.

The UCLA Communication Department is offering “Integrated Marketing Communications” (Comm 148) course with Professor Celia Feramisco. The course will be offered during Summer Session C on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:15pm to 5:20pm. Register HERE or enroll HERE today!

The course will examine key concepts and methods in marketing communications in both traditional and digital media. Development and execution of communications strategies, with primary emphasis on consumer insight, branding, market segmentation and positioning, message strategy, promotion, and execution of marketing communications through appropriate media technologies.

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LA Social Science 2021 Summer Course Previews: Inside Hollywood with Professor Peterson

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As Summer 2021 approaches, LA Social Science will be highlighting some of the summer courses being offered within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA.

UCLA Summer Courses are open to BOTH UCLA Students and NON-UCLA Students. All Summer 2021 courses will be offered online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can enroll as long as you are 15 years of age or older by the first day of summer and you do NOT have to be enrolled in an academic institution in order to participate in UCLA Summer Sessions. For more information, click HERE.

The UCLA Communication Department is offering “Inside Hollywood” (Comm 166) course with Professor Steven Peterson. The course will be offered during Summer Session A on Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:45am to 12:50pm. Register HERE or enroll HERE today!

Inside Hollywood is for those interested in learning about or pursuing a career in the Entertainment Industry in Los Angeles. Through both practical and academic readings, lectures, as well as visiting guests, students will investigate the past, present, and future of screen entertainment and the social psychological foundations of successful storytelling. Weekly visiting lectures from industry professionals provide compelling insights and first hand advice about creativity, business, and the rapidly changing industry.

Assignments involve a short literature review exercise and the careful analysis of motivations behind production using specific film, TV, and streaming examples. For the final project, students assume the role of production executives for their own creative visions by leveraging their new understanding of the industry to develop marketable film, TV, and streaming ideas for today’s entertainment landscape, and pitch their ideas to the class.

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LA Social Science 2021 Summer Course Previews: Department of Communication Summer Courses

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As summer 2021 approaches, LA Social Science will be highlighting some of the summer courses being offered within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA.

UCLA Summer Courses are open to BOTH UCLA Students and NON-UCLA Students. All Summer 2021 courses will be offered online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can enroll as long as you are 15 years of age or older by the first day of summer and you do NOT have to be enrolled in an academic institution in order to participate in UCLA Summer Sessions. For more information, click HERE.

UCLA’s Communication Department has amazing courses this summer. Check out the courses listed below and click on each link to read the full course description. Register/enroll HERE Today!

**ALL 2021 SUMMER A and C COURSES ARE ONLINE**

Summer Session A: June 21-July 30 (Six Week)

COMM 1 – Principles of Oral Communication [West]
COMM 10 – Introduction to Communication [Suman]
COMM 100 – Communication Science [Jones/Bryant]
COMM 114 – Understanding Relationships [Suman]
COMM 157 – Celebrity, Fame, and Social Media  [Peterson]
COMM 166 – Inside Hollywood [Peterson]
COMM 188A – Sex and the Cinema [Hurwitz]
COMM 195 – Summer Internship Course [Johnson/Svenson]

Summer Session XA: June 21-July 9 (Three Week Intensive)

COMM 187 – Ethical and Policy Issues in Institutions of Mass Comm [Newton]

Summer Session C: August 2-September 10 (Six Week)

COMM 1 – Principles of Oral Communication [West]
COMM 105 – Media Conspiracy Theories in U.S. and the Middle East [Arbabzadah]
COMM 109 – Entrepreneurial Communication [Peterson]
COMM 110 – Gender and Communication [Kicenski]
COMM 140  – Theory of Persuasive Communication [Suman]
COMM 148 – Integrated Marketing [Feramisco]
COMM 156 – Social Networking [Peterson]
COMM 170  – Legal Communication [Huppin]
COMM 195 – Summer Internship Course [Johnson/Svenson]

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LA Social Science Summer Course Previews: Sex in the Cinema (Comm 188A) with Professor Hurwitz

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Summer 2020 starts this month, and LA Social Science will continue to highlight some of the summer courses being offered within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA.

UCLA summer courses are open to BOTH UCLA students and non-UCLA students. All summer 2020 courses will be offered online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can enroll as long as you are 15 years of age or older by the first day of summer, and you do NOT have to be enrolled in an academic institution in order to participate in UCLA Summer Sessions. For more information, click HERE.

Check out Professor Brian Hurwitz’s UCLA ONLINE summer course, “Sex in the Cinema.” Since the Lumière brothers first screened their short films to an astonished Parisian audience in 1895, movies have continued to leave an indelible imprint on media studies and communication rhetoric. They influence the way we walk, talk, dress and dine. Simultaneously, the medium has profoundly affected our perception of beauty, romance, intimacy and love. Yet much like fashion, such perceptions have been routinely altered owing to evolutions and revolutions in social, political and institutional conditions.

This course examines the contextual forms and factors that have directly led to film shaping the way we communicate about sex and sexuality. Starting at the dawn of the twentieth century, we will engage in a decade-by-decade analysis of cultural norms, the movies that were made in accordance with them and the ones that were produced in opposition to them. This examination will further explore how the cinema has informed our attitudes towards gender identity, cultural taboos and social movements. By evaluating the manner in which erotic imagery is presented and how sexual symbolism is represented, students will gain an understanding of how past, present and future views on sex and sexuality are impacted by the cinema.

For more information about this course, see the preview video below, and enroll HERE TODAY!

 

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UCLA Researchers Use Big Data Expertise to Create a News Media Resource on the COVID-19 Crisis

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In the Department of Communication at UCLA, the Co-Mind Lab has rerouted some of its “big data” projects to create an informational resource about the coronavirus crisis. This resource offers members of the UCLA community and wider public a bird’s-eye view of news media coverage of the crisis, including a Los Angeles “dashboard” that maps positive cases in the county.

https://co-mind.org/cogmedia/browse/covid.php

Dr. Rick Dale, professor in the Department of Communication, who leads the Co-Mind Lab, further discusses this important and timely research in the following piece:

As social scientists, we ask questions that are of fundamental importance to the situation: How is the media covering the crisis? What are changing themes or trends in wider news coverage? How can we quantify and explore the public’s conception of the health crisis? It is now well established that public discourse and behavior—social and cognitive issues—are also of great importance to public health.

The CogMedia (“Cognition and Media”) project is a new endeavor of our group, and its goal is to find linkages between cognitive science and media activity. For example, our group is testing how research findings in the lab regarding language processing (how the mind processes language) can help to predict the spread of information in news media.

The project collects and analyzes many thousands of news items from major media each week. Despite its early stage of development, we decided to release information and resources to the public. One free resource is an application programming interface (API), so other researchers can use CogMedia’s data in a programming language called R. A second resource includes a news consumption platform for members of the public to track major news themes outside of “big tech” filtering.

At the onset of the crisis here, we reworked our project’s underlying code into a dashboard devoted to COVID-19. This dashboard is an “at-a-glance” tool, using automatic algorithms and data. We have hundreds of thousands of stories, and so we have a record of how news coverage has evolved, along with incoming coverage by the hundreds or thousands of stories per day. It seemed important to shape this information into something of direct relevance to this rapidly moving situation, and share it widely for all who may take interest in our approach.

For example, one resource we share is a kind of analysis on news stories referred to as the “newsgraph.” Stories that are related in their language, such as the words they use, can be interconnected into a diagram. This network diagram quickly reveals “clusters” of news stories and themes.

Consider the diagram below, from the morning of my writing (March 26th, 2020). We see the largest cluster of related news stories is the passage by the Senate of the coronavirus assistance bill. With this visualization, users can quickly see where much of the media attention is going. The network marks stories that are widely shared on social media (the size of the dot) and the relative recency (new stories are in red).

We also created a specific Los Angeles dashboard in the system. Here we have used Google’s API and case lists from LA Public Health to offer an animated map of positive test results across the region. In addition, we filtered results to prominent news items from the Los Angeles Times and a Twitter feed from LA Public Health itself. We will continue to expand this offering over the coming days and weeks as we organize our own information and integrate information from other sources.

More broadly, the Department of Communication at UCLA specializes in this “big data” research. Faculty in the department are developing cutting-edge tools and studies. They are creating an unprecedented TV News archive called NewsScape, political and social media analysis, and media-analysis applications using state-of-the-art machine learning and other quantitative methods. For example, the NewsScape contains over 15 years of wide ranging TV news, and faculty Tim Groeling and collaborators are continuously adding to the archive. The Department of Communication will be admitting its first graduate students in a new Ph.D. program this fall, and there will be great interest among our new students in using these tools to further our understanding of the lead up and evolution of the present crisis.

 

Subscribe to LA Social Science and be the first to learn more insight and knowledge from UCLA social science experts in upcoming video/audio sessions and posts dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Spotlight on UCLA’s Department of Communication: Alumni Partnerships and a New PhD Program

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The UCLA Department of Communication proudly announces rolling out their new PhD program where the first cohort will begin with the 2020-2021 academic year. The department will be sure to attract the best and the brightest since the undergraduate program is robust and students flock to that major. The expertise the faculty hold within the department and across the campus will offer the graduate students plenty of opportunities to shape their research in innovative ways. The department anticipates that the doctoral students will do well on the job market both in academia and the private sector. They have already seen this with the the assistance of UCLA alum Michael Allen who helped market the program using industry standards that culminated into this VIDEO.

This partnership started through the department’s longstanding relationship and sponsorship of the undergraduate UCLA Bruin Advertising and Marketing Team that competes nationally. Students like Felician Crisostomo, who are on team, also partook in the marketing of this new program. Crisostomo spoke about how this was one of the most exciting and rich experiences he has had at UCLA.

He was contacted by Dr. Kerri Johnson, Interim Vice Chair, this past spring quarter to aid with the project and connected him with Mr. Allen. They took the summer to put together a 5-minute video. Part of the project was for Crisostomo to really get to know the expertise within the department. He was most impressed with visiting professors’ labs and classes and witnessed how different methods are utilized to advance the field. Crisostomo noted that by working side by side with a person who has been an expert in the field with 20 years of experience allowed him to gain many transferable skills.

In particular, Crisostomo appreciated being part of the decision-making process by assisting with the images and messaging for the video. Crisostomo said, “It was exciting, because we got to work with Mike [Allen] an industry expert in marketing and pick his brain about the campaign along with Paul [Connor] for the video. I got first-hand experience with the manuscript, messaging and the actually filing of the video.”

Crisostomo believes that this experience has enabled him to be a more competitive member of the Bruin Marketing and Advertising campus organization and prepared him for work beyond the university.

This process is reflective of the types of expertise the department holds which bridges the expertise of the alumni and community partners to give its students a more comprehensive and suitable experience. Crisostomo has come to understand all the benefits and advantages of the PhD program, so much so, that he himself is seriously considering applying for the program. “Prior to this I never considered anything after undergraduate, but learning more about the program has opened me up to graduate school and [how it’s] applicable in my industry. It has broadened my views on opportunities that are out there.”

Dr. Kerri Johnson shares the excitement for the new program that arises from a department that produces cutting-edge research in three areas: cognitive, political, and computational. She shares that the faculty realized that given the work that the department does alongside their alumni and community partners that a premiere PhD program would inevitably come to fruition. The department is growing with the arrival of three new faculty members that will be available to the first incoming cohort. Dr. Johnson said that this program would provide world-class graduate training based on an interdisciplinary approach that includes multi-method training. Dr. Johnson was very excited to also work with Mr. Allen and Mr. Crisostomo in a collective manner.  She stated, “The team reported to me what we needed for the print material and the video in order to best advertise the new PhD program. Paul is a fantastic videographer that made a difference.”

We anticipate this PhD program will attract a diverse and competitive group of students and will yield cutting edge research that will impact academia and influence different industries. Interested applicants will need to submit their application by December 15.

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Visual Representation and Gender Fit in the Workplace

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INSEAD, The Business School for the World, “brings together people, cultures, and ideas to develop responsible leaders who transform business and society” (INSEAD Mission Statement). In March, INSEAD hosted the Women at Work Research Conference in Singapore. This conference offered a space for researchers across the world to come together to share their findings on gender. Specifically, on the experience of women in the workforce and possible solutions to cultivate gender balance.

Among the presenters was Dr. Kerri L. Johnson, a UCLA professor in the Departments of Communication and Psychology. Additionally, Dr. Johnson serves as the Chair for the Department of Communication and as the Director of UCLA’s Social Vision Lab. Her research uses innovative methods of communication science that allows her to uncover unique nonverbal ways of communication and understanding between individuals and groups.

Dr. Johnson’s conference presentation discussed her research around visual representation and gender fit. Many of us have unconscious gender biases that can affect the way we may respond towards others. She found in her research that the response to men and women who appeared to be more masculine were assumed to have more work and STEM success compared to those who displayed more femininity. To combat these biases, Dr. Johnson suggested that organizations should diversify their workplace with influential role models that represent all genders, occupational positions (including leadership roles), and physical appearances. By changing the way we are normalized to visualize associations, we can break the unconscious biases that are connected to gender, fit, and capability.

If you want to learn more about the important research about women at work, click HERE.

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