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YERBY MEDIA,
CULTURE AND
D r. Johnathan Yerby, assistant pro- THE ARTS
fessor of Information Technology, is
wrapping up a study called “An Analysis NICHOLSON
of Presence in an Asynchronous Online Un-
dergraduate Mastery Course Using Structural INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Equation Modeling,” which examined three
years of data in an online course. “The results of
the study will help us improve instructional de-
sign strategies for online education,” Yerby says.
WANG
E xamining metabolites – the end products Have the roles of professional media and
of biological processes – is a core part of “citizen” journalists impacted the way
many medical diagnoses. But it can be a some people perceive the Black Lives
“messy” business – the most popular analyzers Matter movement? Dr. Andre Nicholson,
produce data clouded by noisy returns. That’s assistant professor of New Media and Com-
where MIDAS – a computational tool designed munications, said the movement began to raise
by Dr. Yingfeng Wang – comes into play. awareness of patterns in law enforcement’s
The MIDAS algorithm’s golden touch is an treatment of minorities but is now considered by
on-the-fly comparison tool, matching analyzer many to be an anti-police group.
output against a database of potential metabo- “The conversation has not addressed the
lites. Already heralded as state-of-the-art in actual role of media and citizen journalists in
metabolite analysis, MIDAS is a step towards the portrayal of images we witness of police and
the “key to developing accurate identification their interaction with African-American men,”
tools,” says Wang, assistant professor of IT. Nicholson says. “My research examines what role
those issues play in the ongoing contentious re-
14 MIDDLE GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY lationship between law enforcement and African
American men and in shaping perceptions of the
movement.”
Nicholson is scheduled to present his find-
ings this spring at the Popular Culture Association
national conference.
