About me
I'm a quantitative communication researcher and a former professional software engineer. My research is on political communication, new media, and journalism, and aims to find points of leverage by which better communication could improve the quality of our democracy.
Research areas
- Social mediahow news can have different effects when it is encountered via social media, and the role of social media in fostering democratically desirable citizen reasoning about policy.
- Agenda cueing and reasoning two forms of media agenda setting with opposite normative implications, both of which may occur via traditional news or via new media gatekeepers such as social media.
- Adjudication effects of active reporting, as opposed to "he said / she said" coverage, on audience members.
- Game framing effects of media treating politics as a game.
- Expression effects how messages affect their senders, and what this neglected other half of message effects means for our understanding of communication processes.
Education
- Ph.D., 2008 in Mass Communications, University of Wisconsin - Madison
- M.S., 2004, Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin - Madison
- B.S., 1998, Computer Science, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Programming background and technical skills
Prior to graduate school, I was a professional software engineer and manager specializing in interactive user interfaces. My skills from this former career continue to be useful for teaching and research, and include desktop application programming technologies such as C++ and Java; web design interface technologies such as HTML / XHTML / HTML5, CSS / CSS3, and Javascript; and web back-end technologies such as PHP, SQL, and AJAX.
Contact
pingree@gmail.com