MIMS Final Project 2022

Gender Representation and Opinion Detection in the Media

Team members:

Advisor:

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