It’s 2017. Wow.

Technology has not been kind to this blog. iWeb is dead (I’m probably going to switch to Rapidweaver soon) and a transition with our web hosting has meant no updates of this website for years. I wouldn’t bother updating it at all, but the old info on my bio (from when I was an Associate Professor and Chair) keeps coming up in meetings and conversations, so I couldn’t put it off any longer.

So I finished my six years of being Chair a little less than a year ago, and this year has been busy. My main project has been to start up a lab dedicated to digitizing the analog Communication Studies Archive originally recorded by my colleague, Paul Rosenthal. While literally years of work still remain on the project, we’re off to a good start (you can read about different aspects of the effort here, here, here, here, and here). Oh, and if you’re interested in volunteering to help with the project or supporting it financially, let me know.

The image above is from a related project, in which we digitized the department’s recordings of UCLA campus speakers. The collection spanned several decades and is now available at http://youtube.com/uclacommstudies. The collection has been available for around 3 years and has nearly reached a million views (the big spike in viewership was the 40th anniversary of a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., at UCLA, which got a lot of media coverage).

Other fun activities since my last update: I’ve become the faculty senate representative to the campus Communications Board, which oversees UCLA Student Media, the official faculty adviser to Startup UCLA, and have served on a few other fun committees. I’m also working on a project examining Fake News… hopefully you’ll hear more about that later.