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An Embedding Analysis of Diversity in College Opinion Writing

CSEF · 2023 Computational Systems & Analysis Honorable_mention Award

Mui Theodore · 9

Overview

Diversity is often celebrated as a sign of progress in society, and many colleges prioritize it in their admissions and on campus, but has this emphasis led to an increase in the diversity of ideas being discussed? I analyzed student opinion writings in college newspapers from the past decade, using embedding vectors and topic modeling to measure the range of ideas. I then compared this data with the trend in the number of times diversity-related words are mentioned in the same newspapers. I found that the explicit mentions of diversity have increased across colleges in the past decade, but the diversity of ideas (as measured by the size of the covered embedding space or the topics discussed) has decreased in most colleges during this period. This seems to indicate that while colleges are encouraging more discourse about diversity, the actual space of ideas being discussed in school newspaper opinion sections has been shrinking. Link to full paper: https://bit.ly/diversity-embedding-analysis

Source coverage

This record comes from a published award list, not a complete project archive. Its abstract comes from CSEF's public project showcase as archived by the Internet Archive before judging (https://web.archive.org/web/20230401224130/https://ca-csef.zfairs.com/showcase/ShowcaseInfo?f=838e60b7-ea75-46e8-865c-fde4864244b3); the version presented may differ.

Awards (1)

  • Category Award: HM

Competition history

  • CSEF 2023 Computational Systems & Analysis · Entry S0841

Resources

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