I had the opportunity to head over to Lexington, KY this week to be part of the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication (KCHC) to present a paper I had a chance to work on with two wonderful friends and colleagues, Kathleen Vidoloff and Katherine Becker. Kathleen and I met when we were both PhD students (she went to UK and I went to UT), and we joked that even though there is a HUGE rivalry between UK and UofL, we proved to everyone that UK/UofL can work together fabulously in research! 🙂
Kathleen and I have worked on another project together and this was the first time I had the pleasure working with her friend Katherine, who is at the University of Wisconsin-Milwalkee. The project we worked on today looked at media frames during the Japanese Tsunami disaster last year, but we approached it by looking at both traditional and social media. What we found in our study is even though there are differences in the characteristics of both mediums, there were many similarities in how the news organizations and users on Twitter framed the crisis. It was a pleasure working with both Kathleen and Katherine on this project.
The conference was very cool – they even had their own hashtag (#kchc2012) as well as a Flickr page for pictures from the conference. It was a wonderful environment to discuss leading issues and trends in the health communication arena in both research and practice. I also had the chance to talk with some presenters about their research involving social media (I always get very excited to see other professionals working with this emerging technology! :)). So many interesting research projects and perspectives – so little time!
One of the areas of my research agenda is food safety and crisis communications (this was the focus of my dissertation at the University of Tennessee), so it was great to discuss some of these trends as well with some of the conference presenters and attendees. This was the first time I attended the conference, and I am sure this will be the first of many in the future. I would like to thank the organizers and staff that helped put together a wonderful conference! 🙂 I truly had a fabulous time.
Hope you all are having a wonderful day.
Best Wishes,
Karen
0 Comments