Introducing the Concept Grants from Sage Teaching category winner: MERL

by Gail De Kosnik, Jaclyn Zhou, and Jingyi Li

The Media Education Research Lab (MERL) at UC Berkeley has developed a method to teach undergraduate students how to assess diversity in film and television. For the past three years, more than 25 Berkeley undergraduates have been trained in MERL’s Diversity Scores method, which is to: 1) assign bias tags to the text (e.g., a text that only features characters of color as victims or perpetrators of violence receives a “V” tag); 2) research and tag the reception of the text (what viewers say online about the text’s depiction of minorities); 3) tag the text’s main characters’ identities and orientations. Based on this metadata, the student calculates qualitative and quantitative diversity scores and writes a review for the text.

We began the Diversity Scores project in 2020. At that time, our lab was called the Media Metadata Research Lab (MMRL), and our focus was on developing a metadata tagging schema that enabled us to “count” diversity – for example, to measure the racial diversity of a media text by counting how many distinct ethnicity tags were present in the main cast. As the project continued, we came to realize that there was much more to the question of diversity metrics. Approaching diversity through purely quantitative methods not only rewarded shallow multiculturalism, it also disadvantaged media texts that focused on platforming specific marginalized groups. Additionally, it obscured the fact that diversity is not just about the presence or absence of minority characters, but also about how they are represented.

As our tagging schema expanded and the amount of data to collect grew, we began hiring undergraduate research assistants in the summer of 2021. The first class of undergraduate researchers taught us a great deal: the necessity of researching and tagging audience reception, the need for a two-pronged scoring system, and the need for written reviews, for example. They also helped us realize that the process of researching, scoring, and reviewing texts was teaching undergraduates to think critically and with nuance about questions of diversity in media. That is, our work in the lab was not only producing data about diversity to analyze for research and share with the public – it was also producing a kind of media literacy curriculum that taught undergraduates to evaluate a media text and express their own evidence-based opinions about how the text handled representation of different minority communities. With this in mind, we changed our name to the Media Education Research Lab with the goal of foregrounding media literacy education as part of our work.

Support from the Sage Concept Grant will enable us to build a website with resources and guides that college instructors can use to teach their students to tag, score, and review media texts using our method. The website will also publish students’ scores and reviews and enable them to read each other’s work. Upon the launch of the website in spring 2025, our hope is that educators of media studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, etc. will be able to add a MERL module to their syllabi.