Thursday, November 20, 2008

bells hooks and Spike Lee

bell hooks, a philosophy prof at City College in New York, has interviews up at YouTube and essays on the web, to discuss Spike Lee's work and other issues. You may find her discussions at YouTube by just typing her name, and you may also read her work about depictions of blacks in film at:

http://stevenstanley.tripod.com/docs/bellhooks/ondeath.html

Ad industry and its problems of diversity

Here's a new book--Madison Avenue and the Color Line--by Jason Chambers, one of the authors from our textbook (on alcohol and sexually oriented appeals), with video of discussion about the problems of the advertising industry in recruiting employees of color and in its use of stereotyping. Here's the link:
http://www.aef.com/industry/industry_leaders/2008_color_line/_view/email111908

Interestingly, the cover image for this book features an African-American male in whiteface, a sort of meditation on blackface and our viewing of Bamboozled.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Study about alcohol ads near schools

This UT-Austin press release gives information from a kind of billboard content analysis, about alcohol advertising near schools with larger numbers of Hispanic students. The analysis also counted types of images used in these ads:

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2008/10/28/alcohol_advertising/

Thursday, November 6, 2008

An announcement from UCD

UCD professors, students and employees: Please help feed North Texans living with hunger by donating a jar of peanut butter before November 20th. Boxes are located in the first floor main office and next to the security desk. This campaign is a class project for Dr. Berri O’ Neal’s management class and every donation is greatly appreciated. Learn more at spreadhope2008.org

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

No class this week

Remember, we won't be meeting this week. I'll see you again, for Spike Lee's Bamboozled, on Nov. 13.

As you are researching for your final projects and finding your texts for analysis, please email me with questions. If you are doing a qualitatively study, keep the idea of "saturation" in mind. What is saturation? It's when you've reached a kind of fullness of categories or observations. In other words, if you looked at 10 more ads or five more episodes of a sitcom, would you come up with any more "codes" or interpretations of what is going on? Would you add more categories of unique things? Have you already counted or discovered what is there, and adding more won't make your coding scheme or descriptions richer? If the answer to this last question is "yes," then you've reached saturation.

When you've reached saturation, you don't need to keep adding texts for analysis. That means you get to stop and focus on reporting the findings of your study, analyzing what themes or patterns you have found.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Links for next few weeks

Neil Foote will be a speaker in our classroom on Oct. 30; here's a preview of his perspective, from Poynter.org:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=58&aid=147332

And a link to the Commercial Closet, which Glenn Griffin mentioned last week:

http://www.commercialcloset.org

For a foundation article about stereotyping, here are the words of Walter Lippmann:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/j6075/index.html?edit/course_syllabus.html