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Education

Boston University

• Ph.D. in Emerging Media Studies, College of Communication (2021)

Peking University

• B.A. in Advertising, School of Journalism and Communication (2016)
• B.A. in Economics, National School of Development (2016)

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Research Areas

• Media effects theories
• Computational communication
• Public opinion online
• Daily civic (non-) participation 
• International communication

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Academic affiliations

• 2022 – Present: Research fellow, Institute of National Governance and Public Opinion Ecology, Renmin University of China
• 2022 – Present: Research fellow, Research Center of Journalism and Social Development, Renmin University of China
• 2016 – 2022: Research fellow, Communication Research Center (CRC), Boston University

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Welcome!

My research focuses on mediated and dynamic communication effects between citizens, news media, and government bodies on social media. My previous studies speak to how the information flow in the hybrid media system influences (1) public opinion formation and (2) people’s daily political expression. Specifically, my dissertation “From Media Power to “People’s Power”: Towards a Multi-version Two-way Agenda-setting Framework” developed the agenda-setting theory by discussing two versions of public media (connected survey and social media data) and media agenda (connected website and social media news) and by empirically examining a potential reverse agenda-setting effect, through which ordinary users’ political and civic expression can influence media and policy agendas.

As a Chinese studied in the US, I am especially interested in a comparative perspective connecting political communication scholarship in the western and eastern contexts. My ambitions are to (1) continue to study the impact of the digital era comprehensively and comparatively, (2) work to bridge the two academia, and (3) add more international outlook to the education of the next generation of communicators.

I apply a large variety of state-of-art computational methods in my research, especially natural language processing, online surveys, online experiments, and social network analysis. My research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Communication Research, Information, Communication & Society, Journalism Studies, Journalism, Mass Communication and Society, The Social Science Journal, and International Journal of Communication, etc. 

I’m also the co-founder of 计传岛COMputation, a community that distributes knowledge and the most up-to-date information about computational communication. Please feel free to subscribe to our WeChat official account:

This site is all about emerging media. The name So N’ Net is composed of “social” and “network”, which are my research focuses. It is also embedded with my hope that the words here can be as interesting to you as Shakespeare’s sonnet. Enjoy!

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Contact me at zhangyiyan[at]ruc[dot]edu.cn