Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has been named a 2020-2021 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."
Schneider will work on her project, "Assessing the Impact of Media Polarization on Public Health Emergencies." She will use Archer, a web application being developed by the Cline Center, in her work analyzing news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis.
"My goal in conducting this project is to use the Cline Center's data resources in order to better understand how public health emergencies are reported and to assess the polarization and politicization of the U.S. news coverage," Schneider said. "This is a key moment to study the intersection of the evidence base, political discourse, and public opinion in the health domain. This work may have important implications for better communication of health evidence for the public and to journalists."
Schneider studies the science of science through the lens of arguments, evidence, and persuasion. She is developing linked data (ontologies, metadata, and Semantic Web) approaches to manage scientific evidence. She holds a PhD in informatics from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Prior to joining the iSchool in 2016, Schneider served as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Library of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and INRIA, the national French Computer Science Research Institute.