What is The MeLa Lab?

The Media Landscape (MeLa) Lab is a multi-university lab that broadly works on problems related to online news and multimedia. Together, our goals are to understand online content producers behaviors and dynamics as they relate to safety in media spaces, build tools to support content moderation and information interventions, and curate large-scale datasets to aid media research.

Currently we have two divisions of the lab:

MeLa @ UTK:
The MeLa Lab at UTK is hosted in the School of Information Sciences. MeLa at UTK focuses on mixed-methods analysis of media fringe media practices and influence, as well as HCI experiments with information interventions. Students in MeLa @ UTK can work on problems using quantitative methods from computing or qualitative methods from social science. If you are a student at UTK and want to work in the MeLa Lab, please see this document.

MeLa @ Villanova:
The MeLa Lab at Villanova is hosted in the Department of Computing Sciences. MeLa at Villanova focuses on Natural Language Processing methods and applications to linguistic shift detection. Often these methods are applied to misinformation detection, but the applied domains can extend beyond media spaces.

The MeLa Lab commonly collaborates with the Trust Lab at RPI.