Gender Representation and Opinion Detection in the Media
Gender Representation and Opinion Detection in the Media
MIMS 2022 Final Capstone Project
Team Members: Jade Clarke, Lia Chin-Purcell, Kailin Koch, George McIntire, Siqi Wu
Project Goals
- Bring awareness to the current discrepancies in voiceshare of news articles by major news outlets
- Benchmark current gender representation in the news
- Hold media outlets accountable for their coverage and push for more equal representation
Partner Organization: ReThink Media
ReThink Media is a Berkeley based non-profit organization that strengthens movements through communication and voiceshare. They live out this mission by delivering workshops for nonprofits on media strategy and conducting in depth media analyses. By driving collaboration and innovation across sectors, ReThink aims to reach new audiences and achieve shared policy wins.
Project Description
We built a front-end dashboard to help them visualize gender representation through news articles in their various issue areas. This builds off of previous work such as Informed Opinion’s Gender Gap Tracker and the Global Media Monitoring Project’s Who Makes the News Report. As part of this project we productionized the models, built a data pipeline, performed usability testing, and documented and handed off our work to the organization.
Process
- Conducted stakeholder interviews
- Built gold data for model evaluation
- Conduct literature reviews on NLP approaches and women’s representation in the media
- Tuned and tested quote extraction and news classifier models
- Researched low-cost and easy to use tools for data processing and storage
- Conducted iterative usability testing
Deliverables
- 2 productionized NLP models
- AWS and local pipelines for getting new data, running models, and saving results
- MongoDB Database to store the results and perform data aggregations and validations
- Functional front-end dashboard to visualize data in ReThink’s issue areas
Final Dashboard
How it Works
Video
Additional Information
- Read our full report here (PDF)
- View our presentation slides here, presented May 12 2022 (PDF)
- Check out our project page on the University of California, Berkeley School of Information website.
- See the full dashboard here
- View our project poster
