Media Objects A-Z (hi)

Among the most widely consumed digital images today are films and television series. Our

project, "D/E/I," examines dozens of mass media texts and aims to quantify and display

the degree to which these texts are diverse and inclusive -- i.e., In a specific film or TV

show, how many main characters are minorities or women? We also investigate when and

how diversity and inclusivity in media does not result in equity -- i.e., When and how are

diverse casts used to tell racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic

narratives?




We studied a wide array of movies and series (most produced in the U. S.), and for each

media text, we tagged (using a GitHub repository) up to eight leading characters by

race/ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, sexuality, and species. We also tagged specific

themes and topics of each text that related to issues of racism, sexism, and other forms of

bias. We then designed and generated visualizations based on our dataset.

"D/E/I" consists of three types of digital visualizations:




1) Single images (glyphs) that encapsulate the intersections of identity for an

individual character. (Example from Netflix drama Orange Is the New Black

(2013-19): "Character A = white, cis, female, lesbian/ambiguous, 30-39, American,

human"; "Character B = Black, cis, female, straight, 20-29, American, human").




2) Series of images (glyph arrays) that illustrate the degree of diversity in a single

media text (how many characters of each ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality,

age range, and species are featured in the text).




3) Word art composed of tags regarding notable themes, narrative arcs,

connotations, subtexts, and/or historical contexts of individual films or series.

(Example from Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915): "lynching," "mammy,"

"Blackface," "Ku Klux Klan," "Confederacy.")




Our goal is for "D/E/I" to function like a visual Bechdel Test for media viewers. The Bechdel

Test offers one way for viewers to evaluate whether or not a piece of media is sexist, and

"D/E/I" offers viewers a means to evaluate a wider range of diversity at-a-glance for any

given media property. We provide media users with a visual and textual vocabulary that

allows them to assess, both quantitatively and qualitatively, how well a film or television

series showcases minority and women characters/performers, and whether it does so in

ways that are substantively feminist and intersectional or ways that reinforce patriarchal

and oppressive cultural norms.