Conference Grant Reports: Jaclyn Zhou at MLA

We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Jaclyn Zhou presented on Diversity Scoring at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New Orleans. From Jaclyn:

With BCNM’s support, I traveled to New Orleans to attend the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in January 2025.

I co-presented a paper with Professor Abigail De Kosnik (Associate Professor, BCNM and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) and Matthew Jamison (former UC Berkeley PhD student). Professor De Kosnik, Matthew, and I are all founding members of the Media Education Research Lab (MERL), an arts-research lab working to develop methods to measure and represent diversity in popular media. Since 2020, we have been refining a method called Diversity Scoring, which we are currently applying to 100 film and television texts released between 2019-2024.

Our paper was part of a panel addressing how metadata analysis can encourage more diverse and inclusive citational practices. Our presentation asked how we might apply our Diversity Scoring method to the context of academic citation. We each chose a different way to apply the method: Professor De Kosnik analyzed the diversity of the bibliography of a single academic text, I analyzed the diversity of essays and authors published in the PMLA (a journal produced by MLA), and Matthew analyzed the diversity of papers and presenters in a certain section of the MLA 2025 conference program.

Given the somewhat controversial nature of our paper, which investigated and critiqued the diversity of MLA as an organization and literary studies as a field, our paper inspired a good deal of discussion during the Q&A. Audience members asked questions about authors’ privacy, the transferability of popular media-related concepts like audience reception, and whether the diversity of authors even mattered at all compared to the quality of the work. The Q&A helped us better understand how scholars receive and understand MERL's work, and the kinds of pushback and questions to expect when we launch our website in Spring 2025.

I thank BCNM for its continued support of my work with MERL.