Students lead, mentors support.

Student-led team-building research can be a powerful pedagogical tool that inspires students to pursue their research interests and preserve their intellectual curiosity. At PSRL, we encourage lab members to learn by doing through a series of student-led research projects by applying the methods that they learned at the lab.

大数据驱动下的澳大利亚主流媒体对华形象构建与影响研究

Project Leader: Xuefei Zhang

中澳关系自2018年以来迅速恶化，并于2021年跌入低谷。伴随中澳关系的急转直下，澳大利亚民众对华看法也发生了转变。本研究将视线聚焦于澳大利亚主流媒体，试图探寻媒体在其中的作用。通过选取澳大利亚主流媒体(The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, The Age (Melbourne), and The Herald Sun (Melbourne))中2018年以来有关中国的报道作为研究对象，以复杂网络方法、大数据分析等定量研究结论为研究基础方法论，对澳大利亚主流媒体平台相应的新闻文本展开定性分析进而挖掘其中蕴含的中国形象及其特点。通过整合澳大利亚主流媒体对华形象构建的话题数据，构建更为清晰、全面的主流媒体对华形象建构模型及其变化规律。

Celebrities as Diplomats on Social Media: A Case Study of Hu Xijin’s Twitter

Project Leader: Xiang Tu

This project takes Hu Xijin as a case study and explores the role of celebrities as diplomats on social media in public diplomacy, and intends to answer the following questions: What is the narrative Hu has adopted during international crises on Twitter? To be more specific, what’s his selection of words and tones, his angle of narrating, and the topics he has concentrated on? What do these constructions mean for the public sphere discussion of the issues, and potentially for china’s image? In this case, what is the Chinese image that Hu has constructed with his tweets? And why did his narrative generate negativity from the foreign public? To answer the above research questions, this research selects tweets concerning the pandemic posted by Hu Xijin throughout the year (from March the 11th, 2020, the time when WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic and the pandemic officially became an international issue, to March the 11th, 2021, the time the research is conducted) and analyzes the content of the tweets to discover his ways of narrating, including the words and tones he has applied and the topic distribution of his tweets.