About

Harsh Taneja is an Associate Professor of New and Emerging Media Education at the College of Media. His academic background includes a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, an M.A. from the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA) in India, and a B.E. from NSIT, University of Delhi, India. His research interests focus on how people consume media, particularly in environments where they have a multitude of choices. He teaches and researches media audiences, a field relevant to all media majors, including advertising, journalism, and media studies. His teaching draws on contemporary and historical conversations about media metrics, data, and AI. Before his academic career, Harsh Taneja worked in the global media and advertising industry, including as an audience researcher at the Global News Division of the BBC. His research explores global internet audiences and digital media news consumption, contributing to understanding media engagement in the digital age.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Political Science
• Advertising
• Internet privacy
• World Wide Web
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Business
• Economic geography
• Psychology
• Data science
• Geography
• Economics

Selected publications

• Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’ audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices

  Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · 2025-08-20 · 2 citations

  article

  As the media industry employs big data to imagine audiences, audiences simultaneously seek to understand how their digital traces are being converted into audience data to inform the industry. We explore how fans map stakeholders in the Chinese idol industry, perceive stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data, and use those perceptions to guide their data-driven practices. We conducted a netnography of INTO1’s fandoms as a case study, expanding upon studies of platform audience behaviors, fan labor, and imaginaries. Previous studies have shown that fans generate audience data to influence profit-driven stakeholders’ cultural production, such as showing the size and purchasing power of the fanbase to networks and advertisers to prevent TV shows from being canceled. In China’s profit-driven yet state-regulated idol industry, we found that beyond traditional profit-driven (talent management agencies, media organizations, advertisers) and market information (measurement companies) stakeholders, fans also identify the State as a regulatory stakeholder and platforms as emerging cross-sector stakeholders. Based on a grounded theory approach to data analysis, we coined the concept of audience data imaginaries, which we define as audiences’ perception of multiple stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data in a cultural industry. We show how fans align data-driven practices with different stakeholders’ interests, serving as desirable market segments, promotion workers, and good citizens. Highlighting how fans map and perceive multiple stakeholders’ engagement with audience data, this concept offers a productive framework applicable to analyze fans’ data-driven practices in other contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Visibility of K-pop in the U.S.: Global rankings, ‘audience mis-aggregation’, and mainstream attention to niche genre

  Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · 2025-02-13 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  K-pop, a niche genre appealing to certain audience segments in the global market, has now attracted mainstream attention of music industries and general audiences within and beyond Asia. Previous studies often attribute niche genres’ visibility in a cultural market to audience segmentation and the prominence of niche tastes; however, K-pop’s mainstream visibility in its transnational spread complicates this argument. Integrating the sociology of quantification to studies on audience metrics and social quantification, this paper takes BTS as a case and examines how they gained mainstream visibility in the U.S. as the consequences of institutional audiences construction by Billboard’s global rankings – Social 50 and Top Social Artist Award . We argue that although Billboard’s charts and awards are not designed to favor exotic music, their institutional construction of global audiences is inherently a quantification process, the nature of which inadvertently eliminates regional differences in available audience sizes and consumption cultures when aggregating artists’ worldwide social engagements into ordinal numbers. Consequently, Billboard-constructed global audiences are mis-aggregated, over-representing certain regional tastes. Billboard initially interpreted mis-aggregated audiences as BTS’s global social popularity, increasing this then niche group’s mainstream visibility in the U.S. market. Focusing on measurement regimes, such as Billboard, this paper suggests an alternative mechanism for niche genres’ visibility in a culture market – audience mis-aggregation . When measurement regimes use metrics to synthesize diverse audience segments to represent the whole market, tremendous information is eliminated through this quantification process, resulting in over-representation of certain segments’ tastes and increasing mainstream visibility of niche genres.

  PublisherDOI

• Partisan news users in the United States and India on either side seldom use fact checkers

  Journal of Communication · 2025-05-13

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Fact checkers have low reach, and their limited efficacy is often attributed to perceived partisanship. Yet little research exists investigating the reach of or engagement with fact checkers among their intended audiences. We argue that given their small audience size, fact checkers’ usage is likely driven by heavy media users regardless of their partisan leanings. We examined a slice of Twitter (X) users, following certain partisan and fact checking outlets from India and the United States. Our analysis of over 7 million news users suggests that exposure to and engagement with fact checkers remains largely restricted to heavier users, with little evidence that these interventions penetrate among selectively partisan news audiences. This study is thus among the first to highlight complementary explanations for the limited efficacy of fact checkers beyond the partisan inclinations of either audiences or news outlets.

  PublisherDOI

• Cultivating Data Skepticism: Enhancing Ethical Data Literacy in Advertising Education

  Journal of Advertising Education · 2025-06-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This note explores the importance of teaching critical data literacy in advertising education. It argues that while industry-standard tools provide valuable real-world experience, their uncritical adoption risks producing graduates who lack essential data skepticism. The paper highlights the hidden constraints of these tools, such as opaque methodologies and algorithmic deference, and emphasizes the need for educators to foster a culture of critical analysis. By demystifying methodologies, comparing competing measurements, and promoting skeptical interpretation, educators can better prepare students for the complexities of the digital advertising ecosystem.

  PublisherDOI

• Optimizing health data analytics in fog computing using hyperparameter tuning and grid search

  Journal of Information and Optimization Sciences · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  The integration of fog computing with health data analytics signifies a paradigm shift in the field of healthcare, offering the potential for streamlined and prompt analysis of patient welfare. The increasing volume of health data necessitates the development of efficient analytical models in fog computing settings. The objective of this research is to examine the integration of fog computing and health data analytics, specifically emphasizing the utilization of hyperparameter tuning and grid search techniques to enhance optimization approaches. Hyperparameter tuning and grid search are two techniques utilized in machine learning to optimize the performance of models. These methods are employed in the context of health data analytics inside fog computing with the objective of improving accuracy, reducing latency, and enhancing resource efficiency. Our research endeavors to provide significant contributions to the advancement of adaptable and responsive healthcare systems, therefore promoting enhanced patient outcomes in the era of data-driven decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• When news is entertainment: explaining the persistence of misinformation through the information environment

  Information Communication & Society · 2024-09-30 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Towards a Domain-Agnostic Knowledge Graph-as-a-Service Infrastructure for Active Cyber Defense with Intelligent Agents

  2023-09-27 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  Active cyber defense mechanisms are necessary to perform automated, and even autonomous operations using intelligent agents that defend against modern/sophisticated AI-inspired cyber threats (e.g., ransomware, cryptojacking, deep-fakes). These intelligent agents need to rely on deep learning using mature knowledge and should have the ability to apply this knowledge in a situational and timely manner for a given AI-inspired cyber threat. In this paper, we describe a ‘domain-agnostic knowledge graph-as-a-service’ infrastructure that can support the ability to create/store domain-specific knowledge graphs for intelligent agent Apps to deploy active cyber defense solutions defending real-world applications impacted by AI-inspired cyber threats. Specifically, we present a reference architecture, describe graph infrastructure tools, and intuitive user interfaces required to construct and maintain large-scale knowledge graphs for the use in knowledge curation, inference, and interaction, across multiple domains (e.g., healthcare, power grids, manufacturing). Moreover, we present a case study to demonstrate how to configure custom sets of knowledge curation pipelines using custom data importers and semantic extract, transform, and load scripts for active cyber defense in a power grid system. Additionally, we show fast querying methods to reach decisions regarding cyberattack detection to deploy pertinent defense to outsmart adversaries.

  PublisherDOI

• Hybridization of chaos theory and dragonfly algorithm to maximize spatial area coverage of swarm robots

  Evolutionary Intelligence · 2023-01-28 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Web use remains highly regional even in the age of global platform monopolies

  PLoS ONE · 2023 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • World Wide Web

  The Internet, since its inception, has been imagined as a technology that enables information to overcome barriers of language and geography. As a handful of social media platforms now dominate globally, removing most barriers of distribution; this has created unprecedented opportunities for content to gain worldwide traction, regardless of its country of origin. Yet historically with few exceptions, people generally consume content that is from or for their region. Has the Internet or social media really altered this trait? Analyzing the extent of similarities between a hundred countries' web use patterns simultaneously across their most popular websites, and country specific trends from YouTube and Twitter respectively, we find that countries which share borders or where people speak the same languages have the most similar web use patterns. Global social media usage on both YouTube and Twitter is even more heterogeneous and driven to a larger extent by language and geography than global website traffic. Neither does high prevalence of English language speakers in the two countries, nor does one of them being the United States contributes substantially to web use similarity. Global web use remains highly regional. The technical affordances of the Internet alone are thus insufficient to render a cosmopolitan world.

  PublisherDOI

• Predicting streaming audiences for a channel’s on-demand TV shows: Discerning the influences of choice architecture, consumer agency, and content attributes

  Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · 2023-05-31 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Contemporary corporate discourse asserts that viewers have a high degree of control over what they watch on video-on-demand (VOD) platforms, echoing early academic assumptions about online users’ autonomy. Such beliefs are now being interrogated, an endeavour this study continues by analysing data on the consumption and characteristics of television programmes viewed on a channel’s VOD service and – for comparison – via its linear broadcast. Crucially, our analysis incorporates characteristics – like programmes’ prominence on the channel’s VOD interface – that represent how platforms seek to steer users’ attention. Our analysis also incorporates other programme characteristics, like genre – which serves as a proxy for the deliberate viewing choices users make. Our results lend empirical weight to ideas about the limits of online users’ agency. This study is also of relevance to television scholars and executives who are interested in the specific predictors of television programmes’ success, both on VOD platforms and on linear television.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Angela Xiao Wu

  23 shared

• James G. Webster

  5 shared

• Neil Thurman

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  4 shared

• Stephanie Edgerly

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Antonia Klatt

  LMU Klinikum

  3 shared

• Jacob L. Nelson

  University of Utah

  3 shared

• Thomas B. Ksiazek

  Villanova University

  2 shared

• Heather Young

  2 shared

Labs

• Charles H. Sandage Department of AdvertisingPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Northwestern University

• M.A.

  Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, (MICA) India

• Other

  NSIT, University of Delhi, India