Rebecca is a rising junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, studying intellectual history and comparative politics. She first became curious about the digital humanities after exploring computational and digital research methods in her coursework, and hopes to apply these methods to her interests in journalism and history. Previously, Rebecca has worked the for FactCheck.org, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives. Currently, she is a researcher for Columbia Journalism Professor Stephen Fried. On campus, Rebecca is the Speaker of the Penn Political Union, and has served as Archivist and Second Censor for the Philomathean Society.  She has written for multiple publications, including the Daily Pennsylvanian, 34th Street, and the Feminist Wire. Her research  has been featured or is forthcoming in the Ilios Journal of the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania's Sound Politicks, and the Columbia Journal for Politics and Society.


Tracking Free Speech Coverage in the American Newspaper

Rebecca's project aims to study major media coverage of free speech-issues over the 20th century. In the 1960s, free speech was an issue of the Left. The Free Speech Movement, motivated by the civil rights movement, progressive politics and anti-war sentiment, originated on college campuses. In contemporary times, free speech is mainly an argument articulated by the Right. Using text-mining and newspaper databases, Rebecca plans to track the ups and downs of free speech coverage, eventually producing an annotated, quantitatively-based timeline.