Research Methods
Developing our research question
We were initially given a position paper entitled “Book Challenges and Local Demographic Changes” by Emily Knox & W. Aaron Wilson. After reading through the paper our team found an interest in looking at demographic change and change in political trends over time compared to the creation of pro-censorship organizations to see what influences they may have on each other. After some time spent attempting to gather dates of the start of any pro-censorship organization, we found that this approach would take too much time and resources so we pivoted to a new direction: language. We still had an interest in change in political trends over time and would keep that as a part of our project but now we started asking questions like “What kind of language do these groups use?”, “how do they share information?”. This led us to create our research question: What trends can we identify in pro-censorship organizations’ language, and is change in political trends related to the rise in popularity of book censorship and these groups?
We knew we didn’t have the time to attempt to look at the entirety of the USA but we weren’t sure what state would be the best. Initially, we wanted to look at Texas, New York, and Florida because each of them had diverse demographics and high amounts of book challenges, meaning we could likely find many pro censorship groups. Three states proved to be too much work still so we shifted once again to only look at Texas because it has the most amount of book challenges. A new problem emerged as we started to collect information on each county and organizations: county lines and school districts do not always line up in Texas so many groups would work within their school district which made it difficult to make comparisons against change in voting trends when a school district fell into multiple counties. Finally, we found Florida as our best choice; it has the second highest book challenges and their school districts and county lines align perfectly.
CHANGE IN POLITICAL TRENDS AND CHALLENGES AGAINST BOOK TITLES
- Looked up election data from the 2018-2022 gubernatorial elections.
- Made an excel file with the number of votes for Democrat and Republican candidates from each county and calculated the difference in votes.
- I used the difference in votes from each election to make a layer on a map of Florida with county boundaries through ArcGIS.
- I decided on a suitable scale to represent the election data on the Maps accurately.
- I built upon the maps with the election data to add the number of book challenges and number of parental rights organizations in these areas.
- I also made another map with the number of parental rights organizations & book challenges to compare those.
- I also looked up information on Ron DeSantis and the bills that have been passed during his term.
- Tied all of the information together on this website.
Analysis of Mission statements
- Find as many county level pro censorship groups in Florida as possible over the course of several days through a multitude of means: google search for parental rights groups, news sources reporting on book bans, searching for parental rights Facebook groups, posts made by right wing conservative groups promoting pro censorship groups
- Gather each of their mission statement and about us sections by converting their pages into a pdf and isolating the text we want to look at. (link to all sources used)
- Using Voyant-Tools to find frequently occurring key terms and finding each of their correlation values given by Voyant on a scale from -1 to 1 with one being the strongest possible correlation
- Identify categories to fit the key terms into (Aggressive, Supportive, Defensive, Community, Family, Government)
- Use PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans to identify which counties have had books banned between 2021-22 to compare language used across all the counties against language used by counties with book bans
- Put correlation data into excel sheets to utilize Gephi, making 2 sets of sheets: correlations across all counties, and correlations across counties with book bans
- Use Gephi to create a network diagram with the weight of the edges set to the correlation value that was given by Voyant, and the nodes set to the key terms
- Compare and contrast the difference in language correlations
- Create website page detailing what we have found and using visual data created by Gephi to enhance the explanation
National Organizations
For my analysis of the language presented to readers by pro- and anti-censorship groups in 2022, there were several different methods I had to take to reach the outcome you see. First, was figuring out which groups to use to collect data from. To find the pro-censorship groups, I used a public sheet [figure out more info on this sheet] called “Censorship Attacks.” I looked in the tab called “Groups Formed to Ban Books,” and from there I created a list of all groups that were labeled as “National” in the “Operating Where” column. To find the anti-censorship groups, I used the same public sheet but pulled the groups from the “Groups Formed in Response to Threats” tab. However, this sheet did not have any groups labeled as being recognized nationally like the pro-censorship groups tab had. There were only 46 groups listed in that tab, so I decided to add all of those groups to the anti-censorship list. I made my own sheet of these groups, making separate pro- and anti-censorship tabs. I went through each group, adding the website owned or link found at, form of media (website, facebook group, instagram, etc.), and whether or not the data is being used. To justify whether or not a website should be used in my research, it had to be a legitimate group that was active in 2022 with news articles or blog posts that were posted in 2022. For a website to be called a legitimate group, it has to discuss their activity in the community, have board or committee members, show their locations across the United States, and or show their follower/subscriber count. For a facebook group to be called legitimate, it also has to discuss their activity in their community, have multiple admins, and have more than 500 members. After weeding through the groups, I ended up with 18 pro-censorship groups and 17 anti-censorship groups.
Next, was to find news and or blogs posted by these groups. The goal was to gather a variety of news/blogs that often included their personal biases. I had to approach each group differently, because they all had different formats and approaches to posting. To restate from earlier, all news articles and blogs must be from 2022. However, I ran into some issues where there were no news articles or blogs posted for 2022, but there were general information tabs presented to the reader. I took these when the group was made before 2022. All sources gathered had to be free and easy to access information to the public – no sign ups, free trials, or subscriptions. Some groups had more than others, so I made a max of 10 news/blogs taken from each group so one didn’t overshadow another. Below are all the methods for finding sources for both pro- and anti-censorship groups with the amount of news/blogs taken next to the group name:
Pro-Censorship
1776 Project PAC (1):
Took the only general information page they had posted for their readers.
Parents Rights In Education (3):
Went to News → Articles tab. The articles had no date, but the site was made before 2022.
Christopher Rufo (3):
Have to subscribe to read almost all posts. Looked through top posts from 2022 and found 3 available articles that had more than 1 like.
Citizens for Renewing America (10):
Found at the bottom of their main page titled “Policy Issues.” Only three of their issues on the website were presented on the main page. These issues were named “Secure Borders,” “Critical Race Theory,” and “Big Government.” Randomly chosen from 2022.
Family Watch (10):
Taken from Family News Watch Newswire → Opinion & Analysis tab. They link articles they find from other websites and post them there. I chose the first ten on the list from May 2022.
Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (10):
Taken from News & Events → News → Articles tab. Took top most popular 2022 articles posted.
Heritage Action for America (10):
Taken from the tab News. They were ordered by date, so I took the last post in each month from January-September 2022.
Laverna in the Library (9):
Taken from Recieve Updates → News and Updates tab. Only articles found for 2022.
Moms for Liberty (10):
Taken from Press tab. Took the last article posted in each month from March-December 2022.
No Left Turn in Education (5):
Taken from Blog tab. Only ones posted in 2022.
Parents Defending Education (10):
Taken from News → News from PDE tab. Took the last article posted from each month from March-December 2022.
Rated Books (3):
The only three information tabs on their website.
The Heritage Foundation (10):
Taken from the Press tab. Last post of each month from March-December 2022.
The Manhattan Institute (10):
Taken from the About → Press & Media tab. Last post in each month from March-December 2022.
Civics Alliance (10):
Taken from Our Work → Newsletter Archive tab. Randomly taken articles from each month January-December 2022.
United States Parents Involved in Education (7):
Taken from Resources → USPIE Blog tab. The only 7 posted.
Wallbuilders (10):
Not sure how it was found but the link can be found here: https://wallbuilders.com/category/news/. Last post in each month March-December 2022.
Anti-Censorship Groups
Access Education RRISD (10):
Taken from the News tab. All posts are from 2022.
Adventures in Censorship (10):
Taken from Blogs/Adventures in Censorship. Sources scattered throughout February-November 2022.
Freedom Readers (4):
Taken from About Us → Blog tab. Only sources for 2022.
Moms for Social Justice (1):
Taken from the Blog tab. Only one found in 2022.
Citizens Defending The Craighead County Library (7):
A facebook group. The only news articles posted in the group in 2022.
Civics Renewal Network (10):
Taken from the News & Events tab. Last post in each month from March-December 2022.
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (10):
Sources taken from the front page. Last one in each month from March-December 2022.
Cypress Families For Public Schools (4):
Taken from the Get Educated → CFPS Articles. All posts in 2022.
Florida Freedom to Read Project (2):
The only two news stories posted.
Nampa Banned Books (7):
All relevant articles posted in facebook group discussion page from 2022.
One WillCo (5):
The only articles posted for 2022.
Protect Our Public Schools Manasota (8):
All relevant articles posted from 2022.
Read Freely Project (10):
Taken from Home → Censorship in the Treasure Valley → News Articles Links tab.
Round Rock Black Parents Association (1):
Taken from the Our Work tab. Only source able to be textually anylized.
We Need Diverse Books (3):
Taken from Blog → Opinion tab. The only posts for opinion.
WilliamStrong (3):
Taken from Blog tab. All blog posts from 2022.
FIRE (10):
Taken from News tab. Last post in each month from March-December 2022.
After gathering all these links, I compiled them into their respective groups and entered them into Voyant for textual analysis. In total, there were 141,062 words for pro-censorship and 130,076 words for anti-censorship. I first looked at how often words popped up and after some debate, landed on the four terms “gender,” “teachers,” “law,” and “library.” I decided that “gender” was a term to analyze because it was a top term between both the pro-censorship and anti-censorship groups, as well as being a controversial topic in the news recently. I decided that “teachers” was a term to analyze because it was another top term between the groups and had interesting context shown in Voyant. Using “law” as a term to analyze was also decided because it was a top term and in the context in Voyant, aggressive vocabulary was being used by both groups. Lastly, “library” was chosen because it was a top term for both groups, but this time it was especially important to the anti-censorship group, with 324 counts of the word. With terms chosen, their contexts had to be categorized, with the context scale at 15. The six categories used were Misinform., Opp. Agenda/Ideologies, Agenda/Ideologies, Threatening Opp. Actions, Freedom, and Betterment of Community. The explanation of these categories and how contexts were sorted can be found on the 2022 News/Blog Post Language Analysis page. Finally, to create the percentages for the graphs, I made each context category as a percent of the total amount the word was found in the compiled articles for a specific group.