Research Labs & Groups
The College of Media has dedicated research spaces in both the Armory building and Gregory Hall, and also supports online environments for research lab groups, where faculty and students regularly collaborate.
Illinois Lab for Computational Analytics in Media (ILCAM)
211 Armory
Lab manager: Assistant Professor Margaret Ng
Internal guidelines: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RKIa2IOa8nunZ4Mpjqra2AJak8fBtC0xPZ8fUn6vRIo/edit
Illinois Lab for Computational Analytics in Media aims to be an incubator for interdisciplinary research and education in the study of media. With the infrastructure ready, this worktop is the beginning of the lab’s effort to make data science in the study of media more prominent throughout the University of Illinois campus, enabling the College of Media to be one of the important leaders in the campuswide Illinois Data Science Initiative. Fully functional as of Fall 2019, renovations included a conference table and a wall-mount monitor for meeting/presentation, a working space (two Macs and two PCs), and two cubicles for conducting experiments.
AdLab
222 Armory
Faculty Director: Associate Professor Ewa Maslowska, ehm@illinois.edu
Lab Manager: ICR student Veranika Paltaratskaya, vp21@illinois.edu
Members may use the lab to design their studies (e.g., use MediaLab or other software on machines in the lab) or for data collection. The AdLab is a place where advertising researchers can reserve space to run experiments and collect data on computers equipped with Sona System, which manages a cloud-based advertising research subject pool.
Technocultures Lab and Qualitative Research Lab
221 Armory
Lab managers: Associate Professor Anita Say Chan and Associate Professor John Wirtz
The Technocultures Lab and Qualitative Research Lab is a shared research space. In the Technocultures Lab, interdisciplinary groups discuss ideas for projects related to digital cultures, science and technology in a global context, and more. The Qualitative Research Lab is a space for researchers to hold focus groups, collect and analyze data, and more.
MAd (Media and Advertising) Lab
43 Gregory Hall
Lab manager: Professor Kevin Wise
This lab has four rooms with psychophysiology, eye-tracking, and virtual reality capabilities. Researchers are able to measure heart rate, skin conductance, and facial electromyography (EMG), which are measures of attention, arousal, and emotion, respectively. They can also measure various indicators of eye movement such as gaze pattern, fixation duration, and saccades (eye movements between fixations). All of these indicators provide insight into what people are thinking and feeling in real time as they engage with various media. The virtual reality workstation is being used for studies on different applications of VR/AR in media and consumer behavior and human-technology interaction.
Movement Visualization (mv) Lab
mvlab.org
Lab co-director: Assistant Professor Jenny Oyallon-Koloski
The mv lab is an embodied research environment that studies the manifestations of human movement in audiovisual, cinematic space by drawing on frameworks from Laban Movement Analysis, film form analysis, computer vision protocols, and visualization theory. The motion-capture mv tool allows a moving agent to interact in real time with a skeleton visualization of their figure movement, while a second agent can manipulate the frame’s relationship to the virtual skeleton, mimicking the craft of the moving camera.
Initiative for Media Education Inquiry and Action (IMEDIA)
The Initiative for Media Education Inquiry and Action (IMEDIA) is a project of faculty and students in the College of Media and the College of Education. IMEDIA studies existing media pedagogies and collaborates with community partners in developing media education research and practices.
MUSE
https://museresearch.github.io/
The MUSE group studies the connections between globalization and Internet users, those between algorithms and behaviors on social media usage. Methodologically, the group encourages methods that are best suited for the questions at hand. They conduct interviews, analyze passively collected behavioral data, social media data, conduct online and offline experiments and surveys, as well as applied computational methods (machine learning, network analysis, text mining, etc).
Political Advertising Literacy (PAL)
https://politicaladvertisingliteracy.illinois.edu/
A collaboration between the University of Illinois and the University of Tennessee, the purpose of this research group is to investigate how much U.S. voters know about political advertising, called political advertising literacy (PAL), and improve their knowledge to effectively cope with misleading political advertising.
Media, Technology, and Social Behavior (MTSB) Research Lab
https://tsbresearch.web.illinois.edu/wp/
The Media, Technology, and Social Behavior (MTSB) Research Lab is dedicated to transdisciplinary explorations at the interactions of technology, society, and human communication. We study how people use and interact with new tech, how it shapes our social behaviors, and the ways we communicate in these digital spaces.