Today’s Plan:
- Write Up #5
- Building Up Our Corpus
- For Next Class
Coates and Kendi Write-Up
Two things that I will likely want to highlight:
- This. Which maybe becomes more meaningful when we consider the ethos of the source.
- And this.
Building Our Corpous
Sometimes I am a victim of my own ambition. This week was one of those times. Now I need your help.
I spent approximately 4 hours working on this document this week.
A portion of that time was spent hammering out the methodology to collect articles, which was trickier (and more time consuming) than I anticipated. Some time was lost to getting sucked into news stories (always a danger). All told, I catalogued 18 sources and 54 news articles. Good start, but we need more.
This weekend I would like to spend 4 hours reading and responding to your Analysis papers, so I will task you with completing this corpus collecting.
Here is what you will do:
- Consult the Project 2 document and review the entries that are already there
- Consult the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart and identify a news outlet that is not already included in the document. You can look up the Reliability and Bias numbers for that outlet on the Ad Fontes website
- Google the news outlet and copy the outlet’s URL (we want to make sure we have the exact URL)
- We want to set up a site specific search. So type site:nameofsite-without-www.com and press enter. Example site:nytimes.com
- You will be conducting three site specific searches. The first two require we set date parameters. With the site specific search in the search bar, press Tools > Time > Custom Range
- For your first search, set the “from” to 5/25/2020 and the “to” to 5/27/2020. Check your results. If there are no results, change the “to” to 5/28/2020. Repeat increasing the day until you get a top result. NOTE: Make sure your result covers the George Floyd shooting and not the Amy Cooper incident in Central Park.
- For your second search, change the “to” date to 7/1/2020. Select the top result for this search. If it is the same as your first search, select the second result.
- For your third search, clear the time requirements. Change the search to George Floyd Protests.
Make sure to enter the complete title of your article and the URL as I have in the document. Attention to details (getting the date correct etc. is important.
You might be working with articles behind a paywall.. Perhaps a box opens up requiring you to log into the site or purchase a subscription. In such case, it is useful to know how to grab a “cached” version of the article. It is rare, but some websites, such as the NYTimes, pay Google to disable caching.
For Next Class
I would like everyone to follow the methodology above add one news source to the corpus.
I also need help with another part of the project: developing the heuristic for things we could examine as we read articles. When I do qualitative research of this kind (examining a body of texts for particular features), it tends to be a recursive process. That is, I read 15 or so of them, and then start to see new things in #15 that I wasn’t looking for in #1. So I have to go back and re-read.
I am hoping we can collectively accelerate this process. After you have added an article to the corpus, I would like you to read two articles from different outlets. One article should have a positive bias score, the other a negative bias score. Don’t worry about annotating the articles yet. Rather–try and determine an element of the article upon which everyone could focus attention on every other article (that is not a great sentence, but I have to run to class). Let’s look at the heuristic section of the workspace. INCLUDE YOUR CRITERIA/QUESTION/IDEA IN THE CANVAS TURN-IN.
