I study the intersection of emerging and legacy media and mediated culture through reading, watching, listening, trial and error, and observation. Broadly, my work focuses on the convergence of old and new mediums. Currently, the way that manifests itself is through studies on the YouTube platform, including organizational communication strategies, performances of gender, and digital migration.

In 2008, my cumulative capstone for my bachelor’s degree and first research project focused on the emergence and production of podcasts. As the beginning of my research timeline, this project established my focal points of integrating academic research with practice, as a major component of the end of the project was to develop and produce three episodes of my own podcast. I also placed the emerging media of podcasting within the foundation of radio, which is a format that I continue today – looking at emerging mediums as an evolution on a timeline of media development and medium theory rather, and finding commonalities in models of production, distribution, and consumption rather than treating new media as an enigma. I also studied the emergence of the population of podcasting through its adaption by Apple’s iTunes program, and current production and metric tools.

In my master's project, I studied the use of interactive media at music festivals. I argued that the use of social media, online streaming, or smartphone apps created a transmedia narrative for the festival brand, broadening the experience from a singular experience of the band playing to the ability to consume a wider festival narrative, whether that be from afar or from a different venue. This project used three case studies: South by Southwest, Midpoint Music Festival, and Treasure Island Music Festival. Methods used content analysis of the festival websites, apps, and social media accounts, participant observation at the festivals, as well as interviews with organizers when possible. This research was chosen for publication in the University of Oregon’s journal Culture Work and led to a consultation with the company Teespring.

In my Ph.D. program, I focused my research on the YouTube platform, studying it from a variety of aspects including the organizational identity, communication and strategy of multichannel networks, the parasocial relationship between youtubers and their audiences, what digital natives watch on YouTube, the content of brand channels, implications of the platform in terms of new models of production, shifts in entertainment industry and culture for female youtubers, and youtuber burnout.

While my current agenda continues to focus on the YouTube platform, I consider the long-term view of my research to work on emerging media of multiple forms, many of which have not yet been released to the public. I am particularly interested in continuing to develop my methods of research, such as combining critical content analysis with algorithm-based analysis in the current project looking at digital dialogues. I also hope to continue to explore practice-based work, which will contribute to both my understanding of the medium as a researcher and my ability to teach about those mediums in the classroom.

YouTube has been my main platform of research concerning media since 2016. My interest in the platform stem from its early positioning between Hollywood and Silicon Valley models in terms of business and use case. For this reason, I am interested in all aspects of the platform, and the way it's affected us socio-culturally. Beginning in 2016, I investigated the multichannel platform model on YouTube. This model mimicked a hybrid of talent agent and television network models, where companies would represent a collection of YouTube channels, selling their advertising space, and representing them in ventures beyond the platform for books, movies, and television shows. My paper about the multichannel network Fullscreen, entitled "Fullscreen's Institutional Trio: An Organizational Discourse and Institutional Pluralism Analysis" was accepted to the 2017 Western States Communication Association conference. The paper discussed the multi-faceted organizational branding of Fullscreen as well as its now-defunct dedicated streaming platform.

In 2018, I contributed two book chapters to Louisa Ha’s edited edition The Audience and Business of YouTube and Online Videos. My solo-authored chapter discussed the most popular brand channels on YouTube and the strategy around content for YouTube. I found that YouTube content is often more than just advertising, but is about building brand awareness, loyalty, or debuting innovative methods, such as Verizon’s 360-degree video streaming of the 2017 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In a book review for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Walczer (2018) referred to the chapter as “particularly insightful,” stating that it “proves to be beneficial in creating or utilizing distinguishable terminology that unpacks the subtle nuances of content-cum-advertising and advertising-cum-content on YouTube” (p.315).

In a co-authored chapter with Dr. Ha, we used both qualitative interviews and quantitative survey results to analyze what digital natives watch on YouTube. In a book review for the International Journal on Media Management, Whipple (2019) said that the chapter “centers on the content types that YouTube users prefer, with a helpful breakdown of the most-watched genres that distinguishes the behavior of heavy viewers, light viewers, subscribers, and non-subscribers” (p. 157). In addition to exploring what content digital natives watch, we discussed the importance of subscribers when it comes to predicting the virality of a video, and devices and motivations for each level of viewer.

A main interest in my YouTube research is the role of the creator, or youtuber. In 2019, I presented my paper "Shifting digital dialogues in YouTube relationships" at a graduate research symposium. In this paper, I analyzed the top 100 comments on videos that stray from a youtubers' typical content topics, particularly when they included political commentary in the year following the 2016 election. This interpretive project used parasocial relationship theory and combined it with relational dialectics theory in order to understand shifts in relationships between creators and their audiences. I am currently working on incorporating a second level of coding using topic modeling, which will allow me to incorporate all of the comments from the videos in the project, and align the resulting topics with the themes found during the qualitative analysis.

I continued this exploration of youtuber identity in my dissertation, Women on YouTube: Exploring identity performances of female creators using intersectionality and media ecology. For this project, four case studies were identified, and a combination of visual analysis and media ecology were used to gather a portrait of the YouTube platform’s tools for creators, the ways that female creators perform their identities, and the ways that creators and the platform interact or enact tensions. In addition, I used Hall's encoding and decoding model to determine if performances were within hegemonic norms, in negotiation with them, or opposition to them. This work builds upon my previous work where the YouTube platform was placed in dialogue with previous creative industry models for cultural creation and discusses the implications for women on YouTube. I particularly look at the placement of domestic topics like cooking, fashion, and makeup at the center of female channels, and the use of comedy to frame these actions.

Two of my case studies also went on hiatus during the data collection period, and the consequent dialogues surrounding the idea of "youtuber burnout" and how the media ecology of YouTube contribute to burnout are discussed as well. Aspects such as the algorithm, pressure to maintain a strict upload schedule and content type, and metrics of success that are made visible when compared to a more qualitative measure of success such as personal creative fulfillment. This topic of youtuber burnout has only emerged over the last couple of years, and I am planning a study of content analysis of “burnout videos” where creators announce or address a break from the platform in order to better understand the reasons why creators leave, whether they come back, and what changes are made.

During my study of the YouTube platform, and as the website reached its 15th year in 2020, I believe there are emerging topics and issues that require additional exploration for the next few years. I particularly want to continue to explore the relationships between youtubers, their audiences, and the platform. Many youtubers respond to comments on videos or ask for specific actions such as likes, comments, shares, or retweets of video links. In addition to my study looking at comments on videos where content is measurably different than the typical, similar studies could be done where comment content is analyzed to find common themes within channels or across topics.

I also plan to continue to build upon understanding the media ecology of YouTube. Research on the media ecology of YouTube previously focused on interactions between YouTube and other mediums such as Twitter as it relates to specific incidents (Poell, 2014), and my dissertation focused on beginning to identify the creator ecology through the features of the YouTube Studio and videos uploaded by the case studies. I plan to continue this work through a study of the integration of the use of social media to gather ideas for or direct traffic to videos. This project will develop network maps for specific videos, looking at the ways that content may be sourced from Twitter or Instagram, tied to a video upload, and then promoted back through the same sourcing channels. The resulting study will develop models for linking social media platforms in new methods of content creation and distribution.

Conceptions of gender and identity are topics that I am particularly interested in. During my studies for my graduate certificate in women, gender, and sexuality studies, I explored the addition of the first male-gendered doll to the children's brand American Girl. Using comparative textual analysis, I critiqued the presentation and characterization of the male character as depicted in the book, and compared it to similar character development of a female character in the first book series for American Girl. The resulting paper, "Gendering the American Girl, particularly when it's a boy," was presented at the 2018 conference of the Popular Culture Association.

My dissertation also conceptualizes gender and identity as it is performed on YouTube channels. Intersectionality is a key theory for my dissertation project, and I had the opportunity to write a chapter on intersectionality for The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration, which was published in 2019. This chapter is one of two that was done in collaboration with my doctoral advisor and another Ph.D. student, Dr. Radhika Gajjala and Kaitlin Wauthier. The second chapter also uses case studies to examine the concepts of digital domesticity and digital housewife in relation to online philanthropy on microlending websites such as Kiva and Workaway. This chapter was be published in the Routledge Companion to Media & Class in 2019.

My dissertation’s focus on performed identity began to touch on the identities of LGBTQ+ youtubers and the ways that their sexual orientation may influence their channel content. I would like to continue to build upon that topic, as well as foundational research on “Coming Out” videos (Alexander & Losh, 2010; Lovelock, 2017; Wuest, 2014) by continuing to explore the way creators engage with their audiences, particularly in the ways this may shift the parasocial relationships that are already established. Further explorations of the identities of creators would also include interviews with the youtubers themselves, which will add an additional layer to the visual analysis done in my dissertation.