Category: Sociology

Workshop 5 Content Analysis and Coding

The higher edcuation landscape is a competitive one. Institutions of higher education compete to attract applicants to their campuses. Even the most highly ranked public and private universities compete with each other to attract high numbers of well-qualified applicants and they are often competing with each other for the same applicants. In addition, institutions of higher education often offer the same or very similar “products,” degrees and training in a range of similar fields. Considering these similarities, how do they distinguish themselves from their peer institutions? In this highly competitive admissions environment, how do institutions set themselves apart from their peers to attract applicants? How are institutions connecting with potential applicants?

You have been asked to conduct a content analysis of a highly ranked, public institution, UCLA, to learn more about institutional admissions messaging, its content (visual, textual), to learn more about strategies utilized to connect with potential applicants and how UCL A presents itself to potential applicants. Because websites/pages are a primary admissions communication outreach tool, we will focus on the UCLA admissions webpage to conduct our content analysis. Landing/home pages are a high impact moment of communication and connection, we will be focusing on the UCLA admissions homepage to conduct our content analysis.

There are two stages of this assignment:

Pre-workshop preparation (work that should be completed before class 3/3) and in-class work.

I am including only the pre-workshop prepartion below to help avoid confusion.

Pre-workshop 5 Assignment

Tasks to complete before class, noon 3/3

Step 1: Become familiar with the data

You should go to the following link to review the content of the landing page (landing page only, please do not click on any links that take you away from the landing page): images, headers, infographics, text associated with images, and “stand alone” text of the admissions home/landing page:

1) Look over images (including carousel images on the homepage – click through them) to get a sense of: the types of images displayed, content, qualities (low resolution, bright etc.) who or what is depicted in or the focus of the images, are images a large percentage of the website space

2) Look over the text and text associated with images – what is the tone, what types of information included, what types of language used, how is it formatted, where is it located

3) Review the whole webpage: how is it formatted, what does it look like overall – anything else of note/interesting/stands out

Step 2: Open coding

Before the workshop in Tuesday, please start open coding (we will have time in the workshop to refine codes and develop themes): images, text, formatting

You may wish to develop codes for images separate from text separate from formatting

There is no need to identify patterns at this stage, although you may. As we discussed in class, patterns should be detected based on coding, we should not just code patterns that we detect at this time. Coding at this stage is similar to taking an overall inventory of the data – what is there on the webpage. You should start with 8 categories of open codes (these will be refined in class) to keep the analysis manageable time-wise. Minimum of 8 coding categories required (you may add more, but I want to keep the assignment manageable in time). You may place several pieces of data within each code as you determine is appropriate.

An example of how to start:

After becoming familiar with the landing page (looking at all of the images, reading text, looking at formatting, what stands out to you about the first image on the page? (Keeping in mind the research questions in paragraph 1 above.) Create descriptive codes for what stands out to you/what seems notable especially considering our research question above (connecting to prospective applicants).

Step 3: Write out your descriptive open coding categories and include descriptions of data you are placing in this category

For example:

Open coding category:

UCLA is a fun place to learn (descriptive coding category):
(Add a description of the content – data being placed into this “bucket” of code)

Image of a student smiling holding a laboratory beaker
Quote describing academics: “…challegening courses but fun to learn with new friends”

Summary of Tasks for this Assignment
1) Go to the UCLA admssions homepage:
2) Familiarize yourself with the information/images/forrmat of the page
3) Create at least 8 categories of “open codes” please create descriptive codes (See Dr. Kriukow video) – keeping in mind the research questions included in the first paragraph of this assignment
4) Under each code please describe the data that you associate with that code
5) Submit by the deadline 3/3, noon

Grading for this portion of the workshop (Pre-workshop preparation)

Late submission -20 points

Less than 8 coding categories -15 points

PLEASE NO AI CHATGPT OR PLAGIARISM TO COMPLETE THIS ASSIGNMENT PLEASE PROVIDE WHEN DONE Below, watch the talks by Robin DG Kelley (you’ve read his essay about Aim Csaire, “The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism”) and Erika Huggins – who, by the way, just recently gave a virtual talk for Albertus’s Black History Month, about her time in the Black Panthers and her own trial, with Bobby Seale, in New Haven (https://connecticuthistory.org/free-bobby-free-ericka-the-new-haven-black-panther-trials/) (like Davis, Huggins was acquitted). The video will automatically start at the beginning of Kelley’s talk and you can stop playing after Huggins wraps up (unless, of course, you want to keep watching, but that’s up to you). Listen carefully for references to familiar names, themes, places, etc. I think you’ll be surprised.

This is also a good time to begin thinking about your final assignment. You’ll be asked to put together the agenda for a Black History Month conference panel or session that expands the typical repertoire of figures we revisit each year by addressing the leaders and legacies of the Black Radical Tradition.

The previous lecture by Angela Davis, “Class and the Prison Industrial Complex,” was, in fact, a plenary address delivered at a 2000 conference at UMass Amherts for the academic journal Rethinking Marxism (http://rethinkingmarxism.org/conferences/2000/schedule.html#panels).

What you’re about to watch here is from the 2019 conference that I attended at Harvard, which celebrated the life and legacy of Davis and marked “the opening of an exhibition highlighting materials from the Papers of Angela Y. Davis. This substantial collection includes correspondence, photographs, unpublished speeches, teaching materials, organizational records, and audiovisual recordings.” The conference was called “Radical Commitments: The Life and Legacy of Angela Davis (https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2019-radical-commitments-conference).”

The two talks you’ll see are from a session titled “Revolution.” There were two more sessions after that, “Feminisms” and “Abolition.” Each session consisted of three or four talks. At the start of the sessions, someone introduced the theme of the session and the panelists/speakers. At the end of each session, another person responded to the talks and fielded questions from the audience. The event opened with a musical event, a jazz concert (Davis loves jazz) whose drummer/director, Terri Lyne Carrington, is a Grammy Award winner and longtime friend of Davis. I’ve included a link in the “Supplemental Materials” section if you want to watch the recording of the concert. The set includes a piece called “Ode to Angela,” another one by Herbie Hancock titled “Suite for Angela,” and then songs by Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday, about whom Davis has written in her book titled Blues Legacies and Black Women, 1998. Even if you’ve never been much of a jazz person, I think you’ll find these performances interesting, moving, and at times haunting (especially their rendition of Holiday’s famous “Strange Fruit,” which, in 1939 when it came out, was a protest song against lynching).

The conference closed with an interview with Davis conducted by Neferti Tadiar, who, while I was there, was also a professor in the History of Consciousness program at UCSC. The choice of Tadiar for the interview was an interesting one. Unlike most of the other academics who were present and who participated (Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, about whom Robin DG Kelley makes a nice little joke in his talk, and who hosted the PBS Reconstruction film that you watched; Kelley himself, as you’ve seen in the essay on Cesaire; also Cornel West, who was sitting in front of me, and many others), Tadiar’s work is not directly related to the Black Radical Tradition. Which isn’t to say that Tadiar isn’t familiar with the tradition. In a conversation I had with her at a department dinner, she reminded us that it was King who, in his eulogy for DuBois (which you read), referred to the “obsessive anti-communism” in America that gets used as a justification to suppress a wider scope of political thought and action. But Tadiar, like Davis, is well-schooled in philosophy, and particularly in the kind of philosophy that deals with art, known as aesthetics, so this gave Davis an opportunity to do what she doesn’t do all the time, which is to directly link and discuss the connections between her activism and her philosophical background, including her conviction that art plays a revolutionary role (a theme we’ve seen so many times in this course). Although it’s an older essay (1977), one of the reasons I assigned “Women and Capitalism” is so that you could see one of the few occasions where she does delve into the philosophical roots of her work (this was also true of the “Lecture on Liberation” that we started the class with). But as you’ll see when you read “Abolitionist Alternatives,” many of her readers may be unaware of that side of her because she often writes for a wider audience, more in the mode of activist-intellectual than that of a pure academic.

In all of these ways, the Radical Commitments conference was very well-planned and compelling. Some of the talks were by scholars like Robin Kelley, whereas some of them were by lifelong friends, like Erika Huggins and Bettina Aptheker, by her sister Fania Davis, and by her partner Gina Dent. Part of what I’ll be asking of you later this week, for the final Sunday assignment, is to plan a single session, consisting of an intro, three talks, a moderator, and either an opening or closing artistic or musical event, in a way that gives attention to detail and helps bring to life as many different sides of a theme or figure as possible. In other words, I’ll ask for your proposal to be thoughtful, in addition to being well-informed.

More on that later, now the video.

also do this part Introduction:

A major goal of this course is to expose you to elements of the Black liberation movement that are often under-covered when we talk about “Black History.” In part because of America’s Cold War history, the Black Radical Tradition’s critical engagements with socialism and Hegelian-Marxist philosophy are somewhat taboo. Perhaps with the exception of WEB DuBois, they are rarely mentioned during Black History Month events. If DuBois is mentioned, it’s as a co-founder of the NAACP, or as an author of important books, but mention is seldom made of his socialism, his criticisms of racial capitalism, or his choice to become a Communist and leave the US at the end of his life. The objective of the course has not been to make a defense of Marxism, but to reflect on the reasons why so many Black American and international figures from Africa, the Caribbean, and other colonized regions have been drawn to the ideas of Hegel and Marx, and why their reasons for doing so have been seen as threatening to the status quo.

As I explain in the final lecture, congresses and conferences have been a crucial way that the Black Radical Tradition has honed and spread its ideas. Conferences are also important for the sharing of knowledge among scholars, some of whom are also activists. Some examples of conferences and congresses that have come up in this course are the Communist Internationals, the Pan-African Congresses, the Congress of Black Writers and Artists (in Paris), the Dialectics of Liberation Congress (in London), and Radical Commitments: The Life and Legacy of Angela Davis, at Harvard. For your final assignment, you will plan an agenda for a single session to take place at a conference, with the aim of expanding and deepening our knowledge about the Black liberation struggle beyond its customary confines.

now this is the final project please thoroughly complete this the instructions are below

Instructions:

Plan a panel for a special session at next year’s Albertus Magnus College Black History Month Conference. The special session will be about the Black Radical Tradition. For this assignment, you will produce the following items:

Give your session a title. The title should indicate a specific theme, question, problem, or author, related to what you have learned in this course.

Describe the purpose of the session: In approximately 200 words, describe the aims of the session. You can also think of this as the “Call for Proposals” (the CFP, as it’s often called) that would have been disseminated prior to conference to invite people to send in abstracts of papers or talks they would like to present on your topic, from which you selected three for the session. An abstract is a brief, usually one or two-paragraph description of what the talk is intended to be about.

Create three presentation titles and abstracts: Imagining that you were sent a large number of abstract-proposals and selected the three that you would like to include in the session, come up with three presentation titles and for each one, write 250-word abstracts that explain what the talks will be about. Your abstracts need to include quotes from relevant texts in the course, address distinct questions, problems, or themes in relation to the session topic, and demonstrate a strong degree of familiarity with the material. Be creative while drawing from what you’ve learned in this course.

Identify and explain the reasons for who will introduce and who will moderate the session: Choose two living scholars, activists, celebrities, or artists, one of whom will introduce the session theme and its panelists, and one of whom will respond to the panelists’ papers at the end and field questions. These can be living authors from the course (Robin DG Kelley, Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates, etc.), or they can be other figures who you think would be interesting in these roles (Cornel West, Barack Obama, Reverend Al Sharpton, a politician, a celebrity, whomever). Whomever you choose, explain why you think they would be appropriate and good in those roles.

Identify and describe an artistic exhibition or performance to accompany the session: This can be a musical artist/event, a dance performance, a poetry reading, a theatrical event, whatever. Explain your reasons for the choices you make and how it relates to the themes of the session.

Describe why your session matters, for the conference and for a larger public discussion about “Black History”: Think both nationally and internationally. Think about the things you’ve learned that are missing or suppressed in the conventional conversations that take place about race (and gender and class, socialism, art, philosophy, etc.).

Attached Files (PDF/DOCX): Getting To Yes – BATNA.pdf, SevenElementsOfIntegNeg.docx, Presentation Example on the Ukraine-Russia Conflict.pdf, Super-gentrification-Lees.pdf

Note: Content extraction from these files is restricted, please review them manually.