Oct 5, 2021

The Media Neuroscience Lab (MNL) has received a research grant entitled “Exploring Inclusion in Snapchat Content”. In collaboration with the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (AII) at the University of Southern California, the MNL develops a standardized, full-workflow platform (https://inclusion.mnl.ucsb.edu/) for the analysis of inclusion metrics in Snapchat and other social media platforms. The platform applies a synergistic approach integrating human annotations with scalable computational analyses. The platform standardizes and facilitates the following main tasks: (1) Definition and monitoring of inclusion coding tasks; (2) training of human annotators; (3) computational assistance in inclusion coding tasks; (4) intelligently selecting content for additional human annotations; (5) reliability monitoring; (6) analysis and reporting; (7) API provisioning to include ongoing inclusion evaluations into Snapchat’s algorithms. The Communication Department engagement will not only address the important question of how inclusive major social media platforms are, but also establish better standards for the analysis of contextualized inclusion patterns that lead to reliable, valid, and reproducible evaluations. For more information, please contact communication professor René Weber (renew@ucsb.edu; principal investigator) and communication graduate student Musa Malik (musamalik@ucsb.edu; graduate student assistant), or check the Media Neuroscience Lab’s website at https://www.medianeuroscience.org/.