The associate professor of communications also offered a separate workshop about data collection to a university in Korea.
The fellowship matched up advertising agencies with 14 college professors from across the country. Lee was assigned to the Analytics department of McCann Erickson and the Media Analytics department of Universal McCann.
“I applied for the fellowship to understand what our media analytics majors have to learn to get a job as a media analyst,” Lee said.
Lee said he found that research is getting more important, even in the planning stage. Traditional research, such as surveys and focus group studies, are still dominantly used, even though social media and qualitative studies are slowly gaining ground. Lee added that students, to be good media analysts, have to understand basic statistical methods, such as regression or cluster analysis.
What surprised him, though, was that the visualization of numerical data is mostly done by the programs of third-party data providers that the advertising agencies are relying on. How to interpret and explain visual data are more important than its creation.
Lee offered researchers at Universal McCann a workshop on Q methodology, which can be used as a qualitative method for market segmentation. He also introduced them to LeeQSolitaire, a Q software program for collecting data that he wrote.
Lee also offered a workshop on data collection and analysis in June to the political science department at Kyungbuk National University in Daegu, Korea, as one of grantees of the Korean government project called BK21 (Brain Korea in the 21st century). He discussed analysis methods using Twitter API, NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit), R, and Q methodology.