The main photo—of Mengxue Li (left) and Ruibo Han (middle) presenting their PROGRESS project to the Alliance of Concerned Men in December 2024—is courtesy of PROGRESS.
In its inaugural year, the University of Maryland’s Prevent Gun Violence: Research, Empowerment, Strategies & Solutions (PROGRESS) Initiative provided $150,000 in grant funding to three projects each seeking to address gun violence in unique ways.
“We sadly note that this uniquely American epidemic of gun violence has taken the lives of more than 48,000 Americans since our founding; while homicide deaths in many urban communities have declined, firearm deaths by suicide, unintentional shootings, mass shootings, and police actions have not,” said Dr. Woodie Kessel, co-director of PROGRESS and a professor of the practice of family science.
In search of innovative ways to reduce the number of lives lost to gun violence each year, PROGRESS launched a Limited Submission Community Innovation Seed Grants program in the summer of 2024 with the goal of identifying and supporting research projects that have the potential for high impact. Projects were selected and their principal investigators notified during the fall 2024 semester.
“We hope this funding plants the seeds for novel approaches that will lead to saving lives from this preventable harm,” said Joseph Richardson, PROGRESS co-director and Professor of African American and Africana Studies, Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology. “We also want to support the research of new investigators and early career scholars to produce the next generation of thought leaders and problem solvers to address this grand challenge.”
Learn more about the three, one-year projects the PROGRESS co-directors selected below.
From Echo Chambers to Empowerment: Social Media Narratives & School Safety Realities
Principal Investigator: Celia Chen
Celia Chen, a Ph.D. student in the College of Information, designed a gun violence-related project and applied for PROGRESS seed grant funding driven, in part, by personal experience with the issue at hand.
“I am a 25 year old who has already had to deal with an active shooter situation at school more than once in my life; I had one in high school and one in college,” said Chen. “If I, as a white, Asian, upper middle class person from New York had to deal with gun violence twice, it’s a thing that impacts a lot of people.”
With fellow graduate students and a community partner—Jonathan Briggs, a board member of Prince George’s County Public Schools—Chen intends to find out how, in the wake of school shootings, public narratives surrounding school safety technologies have evolved over time. She also intends to find out whether the narratives that exist on social media are representative of the narratives that take place in person, in communities.
To accomplish the former, Chen and colleagues are looking at the X, TikTok and Instagram posts of English-speaking individuals in the United States to see what individuals are expressing after school shootings from 2010 to present; whether the majority of posts are offering “thoughts and prayers,” calls for solutions, criticisms of officials or certain organizations, etc.
The latter part of the project is where Briggs comes in: The researchers will work with Briggs, who hosts monthly town hall meetings with members of the Prince George’s County community, to see what school safety technologies the district is currently using, and what community members’ real-time responses to that are.
“There’s people who are engaged with the community in the real world as opposed to the digital world, and we’re going to contrast these two things to kind of get a really clear picture of how people engage with the discourse around this topic,” said Chen.
The research team will present their findings at a Briggs’ town hall in March 2025, and produce a final report for publication in a research journal thereafter.
Framing of Gun Violence in the Media
Principal Investigator: Nadine Finigan-Carr
Nadine Finigan-Carr, executive director of the Center for Violence Prevention at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, seeks to analyze various Maryland-based radio, print and local television news outlets to see how they have depicted topics related to gun violence over the last five years, from 2019-2024.
The research team, which includes Lawrence Grandpre, Director of Research for Leaders of A Beautiful Struggle—a grassroots think-tank that advances the public policy interest of Black people through youth leadership development, political advocacy, and autonomous intellectual innovation—is specifically interested in analyzing how these outlets depict those accused of committing acts of gun violence, victims of gun violence, what the media identifies as the causes of gun violence, and what the media presents as solutions to gun violence.
To do so, they plan to reference—and adapt for radio and TV news—the Gun Violence Framing Corpus, a dataset of news headlines related to the issue of gun violence in the U.S. that was curated and annotated by journalism and communication experts across the country.
“The plan is to contextualize the findings related to both episodic and thematic news stories related to gun violence,” said Finigan-Carr. “Given societal notions of the use of guns and the structural and systemic issues that surround gun use in the U.S., and by default Maryland, our aim will be to examine the impact of the resulting frames on representation of those most affected and public policy.”
The researchers hypothesize that topics will include the following themes: Second Amendment rights, gun control or regulation, politics, mental health, school or public space safety, race/ethnicity issues, public opinion, societal or cultural issues, and economic consequences.
“Understanding how gun violence is framed in the media in Maryland, contextualizing it, and providing alternative frames related to the social determinants of health that lead to gun violence are important pieces of the puzzle which can come from this work,” said Finigan-Carr.
Leveraging GeoAI for Gun Violence Prevention and Reduction
Principal Investigators: Mengxue Li and Ruibo Han
Can a growing field that combines geospatial science with artificial intelligence to generate insights, predict outcomes, and streamline decision-making be used to address gun violence?
Mengxue Li, Director of the International Center for Innovation in Geospatial Analytics & Earth Observation (Geo Center) in the Department of Geographical Sciences (GEOG), and Ruibo Han, Director of Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) Programs at GEOG’s Center for Geospatial Information Science, intend to find out.
Working with the PROGRESS co-directors, Kiminori Nakamura (an assistant research professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice), and Terrance Staley (CEO of the Alliance of Concerned Men), the researchers ultimately plan to create a free web application that various user groups could utilize to help them better understand the many factors potentially influencing gun violence in their communities.
The content of the web app that would be visible to the end user would depend on their role—a concerned citizen, a gun violence researcher, a community violence interrupter, a policymaker, etc.
“By delivering customized experiences, the free web app will empower each group to play a proactive role in reducing gun violence and enhancing community safety,” explained Li.
Before the web app can be developed, however, the researchers plan to gather and integrate geospatial data from law enforcement, public health, socioeconomic, and tradition and social media sources into a comprehensive Gun Violence Data Hub.
Then, they will combine that information from regions in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia with artificial intelligence (AI) and geospatial analysis to create predictive models of how all these factors interact—the basis of the web app.
“Gun violence is deeply intertwined with social, economic, and spatial factors, requiring solutions that go beyond traditional methods,” Li said. “By combining advanced technology with community collaboration, this sort of work builds a foundation for evidence-based strategies that are practical, scalable, and sustainable, offering hope for a future where gun violence is significantly reduced.”
Adapting the results of this project into a real-time mobile app is a future goal of the researchers, dependent upon securing additional research funding.
The original article was written and published by BSOS Staff on January 10, 2024.