Jan 11, 2024 Kevin Coe, Fall 2023 DM Faculty Grant Recipient, News Coverage of U.S. Mass Shootings 2013–2022

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

My ongoing project focuses on news coverage of mass shootings in the U.S. over the past decade. I’m especially interested in not only the nature of the content (e.g., changing trends over time), but in the underlying journalistic norms that might help explain the content patterns. The professional/academic motivation for the project has to do with what I viewed as a gap in the existing research, namely that most of it focuses on just one or two cases. That work is crucial, but gaining a broader understanding of trends over time is also necessary. Additionally, there’s a lot of evidence that news coverage influences public understandings of key issues. So, studying news content helps us think about potential effects.

So far as personal motivation goes, I began to think about this project in January of 2023. There had been two mass shootings in a short period of time—an ominous start to the year, and one that portended the tragically record-setting year that 2023 ended up being for mass shootings—and I was looking for a new content analysis project to work on. This seemed like a topic where my academic expertise might align with my desire as a citizen to contribute in some small way.

In terms of lessons learned, I was reminded of how much time content analysis takes! I’ve been fortunate to work on this project with two excellent graduate students in the Department of Communication (Aly Hill and Olivia Webster), and even with their able research assistance we’re still collecting data. That’s just the nature of projects like this. We had to build a dataset of mass shootings from existing sources, then another original dataset of news coverage covering those events (which turned out to be well over 500 stories/transcripts). Then we had to develop a coding scheme for the manual content analysis (I’m also using some automated approaches), and work toward intercoder reliability. It’s quite a process.

How did the Digital Matters Faculty Grant dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

Content analysis has always been one of my primary research methods, and it’s probably my favorite. In that sense, applying for a Digital Matters Faculty Grant to support a new content analysis project made a lot of sense. But what was especially appealing about Digital Matters as a source of support for this project is that it encouraged me to think about this content analysis a little differently that I have prior ones. I am employing four different approaches to content analysis, two of which are automated (i.e., content analyzed by computer) and two of which are manual (i.e., content analyzed by humans). 

For many years I’ve attended the end-of-semester research talks hosted by Digital Matters to showcase the projects that their Faculty and Graduate Fellows engaged in, and I’ve always been struck by the remarkably varied approaches used. So, a project that employs four different approaches seemed like a good fit.

What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

In general I’ve come to a fuller appreciation of just how interconnected and complementary different forms of content analysis are—and how well they work in tandem to gain a fuller appreciation of important texts, like news coverage of mass shootings. To take just one example, as Aly, Olivia and I worked on developing a codebook for analyzing the sample of news texts via manual quantitative content analysis, we identified certain things that we just didn’t feel we could fully capture via that method (e.g., the nuances in some of the ways victims are humanized). It was somewhat freeing to just be able make note of those issues as something we could come back to in a qualitative content analysis, rather than experiencing the frustration of missing that part of the analysis altogether.

What would you tell potential faculty grant applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

I would say start with a project that interests you (regardless of whether it has a digital component or not) and then, as you begin to work on it, be open to the potential that digital tools might provide to deepen or broaden that project. There are a lot of possibilities, many of which any given scholar might not yet be aware of. If that’s the case, the aforementioned Digital Matters research talks can help familiarize you with some of the many possibilities!

What do you see as the upcoming important issues surrounding digital scholarship in your field? What areas/issues could students and scholars investigate to extend the knowledge in this area?

I’m in the field of Communication, which has had a leading role in digital scholarship for many decades. This in part reflects Communication’s status as a hybrid discipline, blending elements of many fields and also of humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Computational social science, for example, is a dramatic growth area in Communication research at the moment—in fact, the Department of Communication is hiring in that area this year. 

What I think is especially exciting is that humanistic approaches are well positioned to shape the growth of computational and other digital approaches as they continue to grow in the field. Projects that blend such approaches will have particular value as we deal with massive amounts of data in the years ahead—and try to do so in a way that is productive, ethical, and cognizant of crucial power dynamics.