There is much to consider about the place of online learning in higher education, but given that “we’re particularly interested in exploring the point(s) at which technology intersects with social justice… especially in the modern American South” this session would allow us to explore at least the following issues:

I’ve got an idea for a web-based resource and companion app that right now I’m calling Content Note (CN). Similar to the way Common Sense Media reports on what’s in movies (and other entertainment) from an age-appropriateness perspective, CN would provide information about how many scenes in a particular movie (and eventually other forms of media) contain racism, misogyny, domestic and/or sexual violence, homophobia, ableism, etc.

The primary goal of CN is to provide a resource that victims of violence, people from marginalized populations, etc can use to avoid being triggered. Secondary goals include allowing the general population of moviegoers to make decisions about which movies to financially support based on their content; to ask researchers, students, and others working on social justice-related topics to both help collect and share access to the aggregated data; and eventually to build sample curriculum surrounding social justice & media-related topics for teachers to use in the classroom at various levels.

In this session, I’d like to discuss this idea briefly as a group, and then break out into smaller interest groups to work on three main questions: 1) what data should we collect, 2) how that data should be collected and organized, and 3) how the data should be presented via the web. This would be a great session for anyone interested in movies, social justice, data architecture, open access, web design, or all of the above.

Thoughts, criticism, suggestions, etc all welcome in the comments. I look forward to seeing you all in a couple weeks!