Introduction to Media and Minorities

In this course we will learn a process for understanding how the media portray minorities. Students will be introduced to techniques developed by Middlebury’s Media Portrayals of Minorities Project lab that enable quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital news to better understand how social groups as diverse as immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Chinese, Africans, and others have been portrayed in the US and international media. Students in this class will learn how to download bulk newspaper data from Lexis-Nexis, to process it using python notebooks, and to statistically analyze it using Stata as they work on a concrete project of their choice.