Hi, I'm Shannon McGregor
I'm an assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and a senior researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life - both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
My research addresses the role of social media and their data in political processes, with a focus on political communication, journalism, public opinion, and gender. My published work examines how three groups – political actors, the press, and the public – use social media in regards to politics, how that social media use impacts their behavior, and how the policies and actions of social media companies in turn impacts political communication on their sites. I take up diverse methodologies like surveys, experiments, and large-scale computational and network analysis, as well as qualitative methods like in-depth interviews, to understand political events in socially networked digital spaces. My work aims to bring insights about and new theories of emerging political communication in hybrid media and political systems.
My work has been published in the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Political Communication, Journalism, and Information, Communication & Society, and I co-edited a book (with Dr. Talia Stroud), Digital Discussions: How Big Data Informs Political Communication.