The Vanderbilt McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies conducted computational analysis of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (TVNA) to see how U.S. national television news has covered the institution of higher education since 2004, the first year it recorded Fox News. After an initial search comprising a larger set of key words/phrases returned a number of immaterial results (e.g., the word “university” used in the title of an interview subject), we narrowed our search to “higher education”, “higher ed”, and “academia”. This query yielded the 517 news segments represented in this dashboard. AI-assisted sentiment analysis characterized a segment’s tone as positive, negative or neutral; the data were normalized to account for the fact that Fox News had twice as many results as the next highest coverage network, CNN.
To learn more about this dataset, how to access the TVNA for computational research, or to learn more about the McGee Center, email us at mcgeecenter@vanderbilt.edu
