Projects
Experience and explore all we do! This page showcases the Media & AI Initiative's dynamic work, featuring student projects, class examples, white papers, innovative ideas, and publications. Discover the cutting-edge advancements shaping media and AI.
Project: Media + AI Tracking
The Media and AI Initiative at Virginia Commonwealth University tracks how artificial intelligence is covered in the news across fields such as journalism, public relations, advertising, technology, and public policy. Each day, selected news alerts are automatically collected and added to a research database. The system cleans the links, separates headlines from publishers, and organizes each article by date and source.
This information feeds into the live data visualizer you see here. The dashboard updates daily and shows patterns in coverage, including which outlets are writing about AI and how frequently stories appear.
We maintain this archive to support content analysis, sentiment studies, classroom projects, and long-term research on how AI is framed in public discourse. By tracking these stories over time, we can better understand how narratives around AI evolve across industries and institutions.
Curated Google Alerts are ingested through Gmail and processed via a custom Google Apps Script that parses HTML content, normalizes redirect URLs, separates headline and source metadata, and structures records in Google Sheets. The cleaned dataset connects directly to Looker Studio for automated visualization and daily refresh. System architecture and implementation by Joshua J. Smith, Ph.D.*