Fall 2021

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Jad Davenport (MJour’98), a National Geographic represented freelance photographer and writer, captured a flock of Iceland gulls outside of Ilulissat, Greenland, which sits at the mouth of the Ilulissat Kangerlua glacier (Jakobshavn Icefjord). The glacier produces 20 million tons of ice a day. See "Never-Ending Story" for more of Davenport’s photos and an essay on visual storytelling. His memoir, Blue Horizons: In Search of the Last Wild Islands, will be out in early 2022.

Visualizing Volumes of Data

For their Information Visualization class, seniors Jay Ghosh and Max Gannett––both information science majors minoring in political science––analyzed the languages used in more than 600,000 tweets to identify the target audiences of Russian- and Iranian-produced disinformation campaigns.

In these visualizations from Ghosh and Gannett’s “Network Viz” project, the orange nodes represent Russia and Iran, the blue nodes represent tweet languages, and the lines between them––called edges––represent the frequency of tweets in a specific language.

After discovering that the Russian campaign primarily targeted English speakers and the Iranian campaign targeted Spanish and Castilian speakers, they captured the results in a series of visual snapshots. The range of iterations demonstrates the versatility of data visualizations to tell a complex story.

Class Notes

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Portrait of Angel Mollel, whose birth name is Anjela Yohana Koisasi Samanga Mollel, taken by Emerald Kristina Smith (@emeraldkphotography on Instagram) in 2021.

Sharing the Love

Meet Denver's Most Remarkable Woman, CMCI student Angel Mollel. After moving from a male-dominated village in Tanzania to the U.S. in 2012, Mollel launched the foundation 1 Love to improve the livelihood of Maasai people and empower women and girls to pursue their dreams. Now a sophomore studying media production, she uses visual storytelling to share her mission and culture.

#BreakTheScript

Ever felt like your doctor’s questions missed the mark? Carey Candrian (Comm’04; MComm’07; PhDComm’11), associate professor of health communication at the CU School of Medicine, shares why healthcare needs to be reimagined one sentence at a time.

#MatchMakers

Snap if you tried online dating during the pandemic! It turns out you were in good company. Vicki Shapiro (Comm’93) gives the inside scoop on how dating applications found success when dating seemed impossible.

Live and Direct

Radio 1190 has created the soundtrack of CU for the past 30 years. CMCI senior John Boughey hit the ground running as news director during COVID-19 pandemic.

What's your story?

Personal brands are about building reputation, so how do you build yours online? Parisa Tashakori, a CMCI advertising, public relations and media design instructor, guides students through the process.

We Are the Stories We Tell

CMCI faculty Lisa Flores, Angie Chuang and Harsha Gangadharbatla remark on how stories—those we tell, pay for and reimagine—intersect with our identities and industries.

Green water over the bow during a crossing of the notorious Scotia Sea between Tierra del Fuego and South Georgia.

Never-Ending Story

Jad Davenport (MJour'98), a National Geographic represented freelance photographer and writer, delves into the art of storytelling learned from a career in photography, filmmaking and journalism.

Leading Forward

Jess Clifton (Advert’03) is thriving in her digital advertising career. Always one to use innovation to solve a problem, Clifton realized young women needed female mentors in the field—so she came up with a solution.

Designing Tech with Mortality in Mind

It’s inevitable that at some point we must all “get our affairs in order,” and when we do, there are checklists, policies and professionals to help create everything from wills and trusts to advance directives. But a key element—guidance surrounding technology and end-of-life planning—is missing. Assistant Professor Jed Brubaker will work to close this gap through a five-year research project supported by a prestigious NSF CAREER grant.

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Fall 2021

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