Category Archives: Optional

Optional: Nostalgia, Humanities Criticism, Austin Powers

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Here’s a new video by Patrick H. Willems (who we watched in Unit 2) about the Austin Powers movies. I haven’t seen those movies, but I found it interesting and understandable anyway, so even if you haven’t watched them either, check it out!

Willems uses Austin Powers to talk about nostalgia, the recycling of cultural things from the past (we see this in how superhero movies are super popular right now, even though the comics they’re based on are much older!), and most importantly for our purposes, different ways of analyzing humanities texts.

Several of you in your responses to our Unit 2 materials said you thought my Shrek analysis was interesting, but you didn’t think the creators of Shrek did those things on purpose. I agree! In this video, Willems talks specifically about that situation: when you know a creator almost certainly didn’t do something on purpose, but the material is ripe for analysis anyway!

Optional: Striking Example of Data Visualization Differences on U.S. COVID Maps

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I was just on Twitter and saw the picture of the second map I’m going to show you, and was shocked to discover it’s from the New York Times, since it’s so different in design than the other New York Times Covid maps I look at every day.

Here is the first map, the main page of the NYT’s coronavirus tracker.

And here is the second map, part of an article published earlier today.

Now, there are two main reasons for the differences between the maps.

1. They are displaying different information.

The first map is color coded according to cases of coronavirus per 100,000 people in a given area over the last week. The second map is looking at when each county hit its covid peak– within the last month, or within the last week. These datasets are related to each other, since you need to have a lot of recent cases in order to have your peak of cases, but they are not the same. So that’s part of why.

But there is another reason. One that I think highlights how the first map is often misleading about how the coronavirus is affecting parts of the country, particularly in the middle.

2. They’re using a different rule for how to draw the colors onto the map.

On the first map, while lines are drawn according to county, the coloring is not. Or at least, they’ve colored in by county in the East, but not out West. Take a look at Montana  (or any of the other large states just east of California) and mouse over some of the counties– even though the county as a whole has X concentration of cases and has an alarming graph, only some parts of the county are colored in, likely where the population is concentrated.

On the second map, entire counties are colored in even in those same Western states with small populations. This makes the situation in those states look WAY WORSE than the first map! The first map makes it look like the virus hasn’t even reached large portions of those states, when in reality, there just aren’t many people who live in those areas. For those of us who live in more densely populated areas, it’s easy to assume that there are loads of people there and just nobody’s getting sick.

Both maps are representing virus data from the last 1-4 weeks. So, the areas with the worst situations are the same. But they suggest pretty different things!

 

 

Optional: Close Reading Tiktok

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https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJyjxxjQ/

Now this is the kind of ridiculous close reading (the kind the creator is making fun of) that we are NOT going to do this week. However, if you want to create a Tiktok for this week’s final assignment in which you dress up as an English teacher and offer your own analysis of a text, THAT would be totally awesome.

Optional: Interesting Twitter Thread on 9/11 News Coverage

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Here is a Twitter thread from someone recommending that everyone watch news coverage from the morning of 9/11, before anyone knew that a terrorist attack was happening/knew what was going on.

I don’t know how old y’all are, but usually my classes are mostly 18-19 year olds and then a few older students, so I assume many/most of you were not born yet when 9/11 happened. I was quite young myself, so my teachers didn’t allow us to watch the news while it was happening. But since we’re talking about news this week, and this person makes the interesting observation that “You notice something new about media every time [you watch the footage] and also that apparently it is much worse to have dead air than to be “we don’t know what’s happening, let’s just replay footage until we do.””

Even if you don’t want to actually watch the footage (I am choosing not to watch it myself), it’s still a thought provoking (and short) thread to check out. It made me think about the news coverage from early on in the pandemic (and to a lesser extent now) when nobody had any clue what was going on and we were learning new, horrifying things about the virus every day. (And new misinformation was also coming out every day.) There’s still so much we don’t know about when this will be over or what that will look like.

 

Optional Additional Readings on Racist Bias in Reporting

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If I had seen this article before I posted the digital lecture, I would be including it there.

However, I feel like it’s unfair to add material to a digital lecture when people theoretically may have already read it.

So, I strongly recommend that anyone who has time read this article, called “When Media Treat White Suspects and Killers Better than Black Victims.”

This is an example of an analysis article looking at examples of other articles that exhibited biased framing of a story without telling any lies at all.

Here’s another example of the same thing, regarding coverage of rape cases. (And another one about Brock Turner vs. coverage of Black people who are charged with similar crimes)

Past crimes/past run-ins with the law are rarely relevant to why someone was actually shot in these cases, just as community respect/good grades/athletic skills aren’t relevant to the fact that someone committed (or is alleged to have committed) a crime. But through journalists’ choices of what information to include and where, they can make it seem relevant while still only reporting true things.

If journalists treated all of these cases the same, and always reported the same info, it wouldn’t be a problem (or at least, it would be a different problem). But there are clear patterns of racial bias in these choices– likely subconscious, but nonetheless present.