This page includes the topic model visualizations from the work that I did as part of the 2022 C-SPAN Center for Scholarship and Engagement Research Conference. These topic models represent data collected from the C-Span Video Archives during the presidential transition periods during the Great Recession (Bush to Biden) and the COVID-19 Recession (Trump to Biden).

Great Recession Transition Topic Model (Nov 5, 2008 to Jan 20, 2009)

COVID-19 Recession Transition Topic Model (Nov 4, 2020 to Jan 20, 2021)

Dissertation – Topic Models

This page includes visualizations of the topic models that I used to dig deeper into the narratives that emerged during this investigation. Feel free to explore the visualizations to get a better sense of how each topic illuminated these economic narratives.

Topic modeling was a central component of the first study of my dissertation. The first study, which examined news coverage during both disruption and policy inflection policy points, used topic modeling to interrogate the storytelling practices and grand narrative influences that shaped how discourse in newsprint began to make sense of difficult economic times.

COVID-19 Recession

Great Recession

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to be the lone communication scholar in a sea of economists, physicists, and mathematicians for a three-week problem-solving workshop hosted by the Fields Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research. The problem-solving workshop was an opportunity to investigate and rethink economic approaches to systemic recovery.

Needless to say, it was an exciting three weeks. Over the course of the workshop, I worked with an international cohort of brillaint collaborators, all of whom are represented in the video below, to develop an answer to the problem posed by the Canadian Department of Finance regarding the need for a new class of economic models for managing crisis. The problem incorporated questions of radical uncertainty, trade-offs between resilience and uncertainty, and the introduction of social and institutional factors into economic modelling.

We quickly decided that we needed to divide these projects into two mutually informative sub-projects: an applied project and an epistemological project.

Collectively, our team worked to simultaneously create an initial exploration of various crisis scenarios and policy interventions using an agent-based model and to develop a more theoretically-focused analysis of the various ways that modeling techniques and economic theory can engage new understandings of uncertainty, resilience, and social dynamics.

It was an incredible privilege to be able to think with and learn from the brilliant minds in this workshop, and I am so pleased to have the recorded evidence of our work preserved in the video below.

One of the first projects that I began working on when I joined the doctoral program at the University of South Florida is now officially published in Communication Monographs.

Link to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03637751.2021.1971272

This piece is an examination of the concept of anticipatory resilience (from the communication theory of resilience) using the antenarrative theoretical framework developed by David Boje. My coauthors and I use the two ideas in concert to advance a reframed understanding of how individuals make sense of the future in terms of the stories of past disruption. We argue that, too often, scholars search for coherence in peoples’ stories of disruption in order to demonstrate that they have moved past or found meaning in those events; we argue, instead, that places where incoherence emerges in those narratives is the key to understanding how people move forward and craft new realities.

This piece was a long time in the making, and I am so pleased to be able to share it now. Also, many thanks to my coauthors Elizabeth A. Hintz and Patrice M. Buzzanell.