B Mckernan
Biographic Data
| ID | 39876 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Mckernan |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Mckernan |
| SIGNATURE | MCKERNAN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5565-1183 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A Call for Cultural Sensitivity: The Complexity of Election Conspiracy Theory Believers
Scholars and journalists have turned their attention toward conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, much of this work has focused on the most extreme believers, contributing to a stereotypical portrayal of conspiracy theory believers as paranoid and insulated. To expand our understanding, we need research that examines the wider spectrum of believers using culturally sensitive methods. For this work, I interviewed 25 U.S. conservatives who expressed …
The Efficacy of Large Language Models and Crowd Annotation for Accurate Content Analysis of Political Social Media Messages
Systematic content analysis of messaging has been a staple method in the study of communication. While computer-assisted content analysis has been used in the field for three decades, advances in machine learning and crowd-based annotation combined with the ease of collecting volumes of text-based communication via social media have made the opportunities for classification of messages easier and faster. The greatest advancement yet might be in t…
Uncertainty and deep stories in election conspiracy theory beliefs
Political Claimsmaking and Emotional Expression
Research on emotional stimuli in politics often overlooks how citizens use emotion when engaging politicians. We begin to address this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between frames, emotion, and sentiment in individual claimsmaking. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to classify sentiment and frames in 153,288 emails sent to Governor Jeb Bush about …
Narratives of Volunteering and Social Change in Wartime Ukraine
Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitut…
A Human-Centered Design Approach to Creating Tools to Help Journalists Monitor Digital Political Ads: Insights and Challenges
Political actors have increasingly incorporated digital advertising into their persuasive efforts. Greater transparency of how political actors are using digital ads is necessary given concerns that they may be using digital ads to suppress voter turnout and spread disinformation and xenophobia. We apply a human-centered design framework to identify the design requirements necessary to create tools that satisfy journalists’ needs for covering dig…
Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research: Influence, Populism, Partisanship, Polarisation
Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of su…
Seeding Doubts About Voting Broadly and Strategically: Trump and Biden Rhetoric Online in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
When rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that Donald Trump had been robbed of the presidency. Presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (Mercieca, 2020). Indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what Taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared real…
Flexible versus structured support for reasoning: Enhancing analytical reasoning through a flexible analytic technique
Structured analytic techniques (SATs) help the intelligence community reduce flaws in cognition that lead to faulty reasoning. To ascertain whether SATs provide benefits to reasoning we conducted an experiment within a web-based application, comparing three conditions: 1) unaided reasoning, 2) a prototypical order-based SAT and 3) a flexible, process-based SAT that we call TRACE. Our findings suggest that the more flexible SAT generated higher qu…
Digital Texts and Moral Questions About Immigration: Papers, Please and the Capacity for a Video Game to Stimulate Sociopolitical Discussion
Scholars and critics have praised the video game, Papers, Please ( PP), for raising critical awareness of sociopolitical issues, including immigration. To begin to determine whether PP stimulated public discussions of pertinent social issues, I adopt insights and techniques from cultural sociology to study how posters in an online forum engage with PP. I use computational topic modeling to reveal the topics forum members discuss and qualitative c…
Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020
Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning-from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from…
Privacy in Crowdsourcing: A Review of the Threats and Challenges
Video games, contestation, and meaning: A strong program approach to studying artistic legitimation
Balancing Play and Formal Training in the Design of Serious Games
This article discusses the design and development of two serious games intended to train people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases in their decision-making in less than an hour each. In our development process, we found a tension between rich and flexible experimentation and exploration experiences and robust learning experiences that ensured the lesson content was easily understood and recalled. In line with game-based learning researc…
The meaning of a game: Stereotypes, video game commentary and color-blind racism
The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences
The Morality of Play: Video Game Coverage in The New York Times From 1980 to 2010
Over the last several decades, video games have become one of America's most popular pastimes. Sadly, little academic work has studied media coverage of video games during this transformation. Williams' analysis of news magazines' coverage from 1970 to 2000 offers the only research into this topic. However, the video game industry has significantly changed since 2000. To remedy this gap, I examine video game coverage in The New York Times over th…
Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding
Many social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy’s collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America’s preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understandi…
Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art
Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art
Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding
Many social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy’s collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America’s preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understandi…
Narratives of Volunteering and Social Change in Wartime Ukraine
Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitut…
Video games, contestation, and meaning: A strong program approach to studying artistic legitimation
The meaning of a game: Stereotypes, video game commentary and color-blind racism
Digital Texts and Moral Questions About Immigration: Papers, Please and the Capacity for a Video Game to Stimulate Sociopolitical Discussion
Scholars and critics have praised the video game, Papers, Please ( PP), for raising critical awareness of sociopolitical issues, including immigration. To begin to determine whether PP stimulated public discussions of pertinent social issues, I adopt insights and techniques from cultural sociology to study how posters in an online forum engage with PP. I use computational topic modeling to reveal the topics forum members discuss and qualitative c…
Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art
Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding
Many social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy’s collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America’s preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understandi…
The Morality of Play: Video Game Coverage in The New York Times From 1980 to 2010
Over the last several decades, video games have become one of America's most popular pastimes. Sadly, little academic work has studied media coverage of video games during this transformation. Williams' analysis of news magazines' coverage from 1970 to 2000 offers the only research into this topic. However, the video game industry has significantly changed since 2000. To remedy this gap, I examine video game coverage in The New York Times over th…
The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences
The meaning of a game: Stereotypes, video game commentary and color-blind racism
Balancing Play and Formal Training in the Design of Serious Games
This article discusses the design and development of two serious games intended to train people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases in their decision-making in less than an hour each. In our development process, we found a tension between rich and flexible experimentation and exploration experiences and robust learning experiences that ensured the lesson content was easily understood and recalled. In line with game-based learning researc…
Video games, contestation, and meaning: A strong program approach to studying artistic legitimation
Privacy in Crowdsourcing: A Review of the Threats and Challenges
Flexible versus structured support for reasoning: Enhancing analytical reasoning through a flexible analytic technique
Structured analytic techniques (SATs) help the intelligence community reduce flaws in cognition that lead to faulty reasoning. To ascertain whether SATs provide benefits to reasoning we conducted an experiment within a web-based application, comparing three conditions: 1) unaided reasoning, 2) a prototypical order-based SAT and 3) a flexible, process-based SAT that we call TRACE. Our findings suggest that the more flexible SAT generated higher qu…
Digital Texts and Moral Questions About Immigration: Papers, Please and the Capacity for a Video Game to Stimulate Sociopolitical Discussion
Scholars and critics have praised the video game, Papers, Please ( PP), for raising critical awareness of sociopolitical issues, including immigration. To begin to determine whether PP stimulated public discussions of pertinent social issues, I adopt insights and techniques from cultural sociology to study how posters in an online forum engage with PP. I use computational topic modeling to reveal the topics forum members discuss and qualitative c…
Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020
Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning-from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from…
A Human-Centered Design Approach to Creating Tools to Help Journalists Monitor Digital Political Ads: Insights and Challenges
Political actors have increasingly incorporated digital advertising into their persuasive efforts. Greater transparency of how political actors are using digital ads is necessary given concerns that they may be using digital ads to suppress voter turnout and spread disinformation and xenophobia. We apply a human-centered design framework to identify the design requirements necessary to create tools that satisfy journalists’ needs for covering dig…
Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research: Influence, Populism, Partisanship, Polarisation
Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of su…
Seeding Doubts About Voting Broadly and Strategically: Trump and Biden Rhetoric Online in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
When rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that Donald Trump had been robbed of the presidency. Presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (Mercieca, 2020). Indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what Taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared real…
Narratives of Volunteering and Social Change in Wartime Ukraine
Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitut…
The Efficacy of Large Language Models and Crowd Annotation for Accurate Content Analysis of Political Social Media Messages
Systematic content analysis of messaging has been a staple method in the study of communication. While computer-assisted content analysis has been used in the field for three decades, advances in machine learning and crowd-based annotation combined with the ease of collecting volumes of text-based communication via social media have made the opportunities for classification of messages easier and faster. The greatest advancement yet might be in t…
Uncertainty and deep stories in election conspiracy theory beliefs
Political Claimsmaking and Emotional Expression
Research on emotional stimuli in politics often overlooks how citizens use emotion when engaging politicians. We begin to address this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between frames, emotion, and sentiment in individual claimsmaking. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to classify sentiment and frames in 153,288 emails sent to Governor Jeb Bush about …
A Call for Cultural Sensitivity: The Complexity of Election Conspiracy Theory Believers
Scholars and journalists have turned their attention toward conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, much of this work has focused on the most extreme believers, contributing to a stereotypical portrayal of conspiracy theory believers as paranoid and insulated. To expand our understanding, we need research that examines the wider spectrum of believers using culturally sensitive methods. For this work, I interviewed 25 U.S. conservatives who expressed …
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Social Media and Politics (8 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Media Studies and Communication (5 works) · Social science (5 works)