As we near the end of this month, we’d like to share some of the exciting projects we’ve worked on recently — and some of our team’s own media interests, too.

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Updates from the Lab

• We recently published a new report with United We Dream Action that looked at Latinx encounters with immigration stories in the media, which was covered in both The New York Times and NBC News. This work builds off previous research with Equis Labs and Cultural Engagement Lab.
• Our Science Director Riki Conrey spoke with Jeff Chang, Senior Advisor at Race Forward, about how our research was used to create effective media interventions for hard-to-reach audiences. Listen to the audio recording or read the transcript here.
• Another partner leveraging our research to inform a data-driven storytelling approach is the West Virginia Community Development Hub. Read more about how they used the Narrative Observatory to transform their outreach efforts.
• Women’s Way, a gender equity organization, and Purpose, a social impact agency, recently used the Narrative Observatory to test public narratives about poverty and economic mobility. Read more about their findings.

What We're Into

• When we’re not researching media, we’re avidly consuming it, notably the podcast Hidden Brain. The recent episode “How to Change the World” explores how data and psychology can be used to analyze the efficacy of violent versus nonviolent revolutions throughout history.
• Believe it or not, some of us enjoy time away from screens. We love a good book, like the latest from ethics philosopher and information systems expert Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a revealing look at how corporations turn human experience into data, and the consequences of these structures.
• Speaking of corporations using our personal data, a group of Artificial Intelligence researchers, some of them employees of Meta, recently used 7M+ public, geolocated social media photos to construct an “underground fashion map.”
• We’ve recently discovered Logic, a print magazine trying to disrupt the discourse around tech, via this fascinating conversation with André Brock, Jr. and J. Khadijah Abdurahman that traces the history of disinformation on the Black internet.
• Proving that the internet can still be a weird and wonderful place, we’ve been loving an Instagram account that highlights the strangest, most obscure, and most interesting pages from Wikipedia (which, of course, has its own Wikipedia page).

We are looking for new, innovative partners to join the Narrative Observatory. Have an interesting project related to audience, narrative, or story? Looking to supercharge your storytelling efforts for culture change? Let’s talk.