Yibing Sun is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores how multimodal content is produced, circulated, and interpreted within networked communication environments, with particular attention to visual persuasion, visual politics, and the role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping public understanding.
Her research agenda consists of two interconnected strands:
- Visual Meaning-Making — focusing on both macro-level analyses of visual circulation across media environments and micro-level investigations of visual persuasion and its effects on audiences.
- AI in Multimodal Communication: as Agent and Method — examining the implications of AI for communication research and practice, with a particular emphasis on multimodal large language models (LLMs) as (a) methodological tools for analyzing multimodal data and (b) communicators capable of generating persuasive messages.
In Fall 2025, Yibing will be teaching J677: Concepts & Tools for Data Analysis and Visualization.