Accomplished Alumni: Miyoung Chong, using her voice to amplify issues of information, democracy, and social justice

Miyoung Chong’s most recent accomplishment is being appointed as tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Digital Communication at the University of South Florida. There she will be teaching both graduate and undergraduate classes and conducting research with an emphasis on data and visual journalism as well as on issues about the environment, oceanography, and sustainability by collaborating with the scholars at the Environmental & Oceanographic Sciences Research & Teaching Facility.

Immediately after graduating from the Information Science Department with a Ph.D. concentrating in data science in summer 2020, Miyoung started her postdoc work as a research associate in the Deliberative Media Lab at the University of Virginia. At UVA, she set up timely demanding courses, including “Democratic Politics in the New Media Environment” and “Data Journalism and Social Media.” Miyoung also led research projects on critical media and social informatics research, and her collaborative works were honored with research paper awards both at the ASIS&T SIG-SM (Special Interest Group-Social Media) workshop and the UVA Postdoc Research Symposium in November 2021.

Before joining the College of Information, Miyoung finished a Bachelor of Arts in English Education in South Korea and a Master of Arts in Journalism from UNT’s Mayborn School of Journalism. Of her Linguistics background she says, “My studies in linguistics helped me understand natural language processing in data science.” Of her time in the journalism department she says, “I loved the atmosphere of open, interactive, and liberal professors who were always supportive of my scholarly efforts.” Miyoung enjoyed casual, friendly, and welcoming collaboration with the department members. She is grateful for the support of Drs. Suliman Hawamdeh, Jiangping Chen, and Jeff Allen from the College of Information. Especially, she thanks her dissertation committee, Drs. Junhua Ding, Tracy Everbach, Gwen Nisbett, and Brian O’Conner and their approachable style that helped her get to where she is. Miyoung also deeply appreciates Siva Vaidhynathan, who is the director of the Deliberative Media Lab, for his thorough support as well as Jennifer Lynne Ludovici, the lab manager at UVA.

During her time at UNT, she was granted several scholarships and awards, including the prestigious Mark E. Rorvig Endowed Graduate Fellowship, at which time she was honored at the Information Science department’s 80th anniversary celebration. 

Miyoung said, “The core of my research and professional service has been a deep commitment to human rights and justice for gender and social minorities.” Centering on the intersections of minority, information, and power in digital, social, and news media settings with a critical informatics approach, Miyoung has 18 publications, including 15 first-authored empirical articles, on a wide variety of subjects relevant to these areas and to us as a just society in search of information justice. Sponsored by the ASIS&T SIG-SM, where she serves as the communication chair, she organized a panel session, titled “Delving into Data Science Methods in Response to the COVID-19 Infodemic” for the 2022 ASIS&T Annual Meeting in October. Miyoung is looking forward to meeting many UNT information science scholars at the upcoming ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh this Fall.