This post details the data and methods used in the article Higher Ed and the Tale of 2 News Feeds, published by Inside Higher Ed. The research was conducted by Vanderbilt's McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies.
The McGee Center aims to equip individuals with the essential skills and knowledge required to adeptly navigate and critically assess narratives in the dynamic media landscape of the 21st century. Through innovative research endeavors, collaborative educational initiatives, and active engagement with the community, the McGee Center is helping build a future where media literacy becomes a cornerstone for informed and empowered citizenship.
The Vanderbilt McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies conducted computational analysis of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (TVNA) to see how U.S. national television news has covered the institution of higher education since 2004, the first year it recorded Fox News. After an initial search comprising a larger set of key words/phrases returned a number of immaterial results (e.g., the word “university” used in the title of an interview subject), we narrowed our search to “higher education”, “higher ed”, and “academia”. This query yielded the 517 news segments represented in this dashboard. AI-assisted sentiment analysis characterized a segment’s tone as positive, negative or neutral; the data were normalized to account for the fact that Fox News had twice as many results as the next highest coverage network, CNN.
To learn more about this dataset, how to access the TVNA for computational research, or to learn more about the McGee Center, email us at mcgeecenter@vanderbilt.edu
