mmrl (rhymes with "pearl") is a research lab headed by Prof. Abigail De Kosnik and several former and current graduate students. Undergraduates in the lab work on tagging films and TV texts for the ethnicities, genders, ages, sexualities, and nationalities of the primary characters. The goal of mmrl is to create a "diversity scoring" system for media texts, that will allow users to understand how much or little, and how well or poorly, a media text represents different identities.
Our research question is: Can we find a way to quantify and measure the diversity of representation in media texts (i.e., film and TV)? What is the best data management system for our metadata tagging and scoring methods, that humanities and social science students can easily use? How can we design a website that will enable large numbers of users to access and understand our results, and perhaps to contribute tags and scores of their own?
