THE MESA GROUP
The Media Ecology and Strategic Analysis (MESA)
The Media Ecology and Strategic Analysis (MESA) Group is a transdisciplinary group with a broad mission to address the rising need for strategic narrative assessment as a tool for promoting cooperative assistance and creating community power.
Our Work
Media Narrative
Assessment of media expressive of the viewpoints of the involved political communities is a key part of our process. The availability of academic and open source information gathering platforms that aggregate media content from specific consumer communities is staggering. Internet archiving allows for longitudinal analysis of some communities, other communities can be assessed in real time across a multitude of available media platforms. We apply inductively-built quantitative and qualitative analyses on media data using trained researchers, employ privately-developed algorithms to aggregated media content, and standardize the amounts of media content over time in order to provide points of comparison. These findings are related over to strategic narrative theories designed to reveal certain elements of perspective.
Field Narrative
Assessment of conversations with individual members of a political community is invaluable in reducing potential error of researcher inference made on media data. Moreover, individual members can further elaborate and contextualize elements of perspective far more comprehensively than made possible by media theory. We assess what the individuals of various political communities view as “good” action toward solving, assessing, and addressing a problem. We do so by conducting focus groups, in-depth interviews, and assessing survey data.
