The Reframed Stories Project asks people to respond to dominant themes and issues that appear in news coverage about their communities. These stories are reflections by people who are frequently represented by others in the media. Word clouds are created using the Media Cloud platform, a data analysis tool which examines a collection of media outlets over a specific period of time, allowing participants to analyze and discuss preliminary insights into how they might be represented in the media. The project refrains from making conclusive pronouncements about the data, and instead is a starting point that creates space for discussion about how they can help shape their own media representation through digital media.

Stefy Muñoz is a member of the broadcast team of the weekly radio magazine program “La Movida Independiente” on Wambra Radio in Quito, Ecuador. The following is a transcript of the video about Stefy's analysis of the word cloud for the term, “feminismo” (feminisim) within the Ecuadorian context.

Dominant words from 112 articles published between January 2017 and April 2018 mentioning “feminismo” (feminisim) within 2 Media Cloud collections of Ecuador’s Spanish-language media outlets. (view larger image)

What about the word cloud drew your attention most?

Nosotros teníamos un imaginario bastante negativo con respecto al ‘feminismo’ y por ende creíamos que se reflejaría en la nube, pero cuando buscamos en la nube, de hecho hay bastantes términos que son positivos con respecto al feminismo. Sale, por ejemplo, ‘igualdad’, ‘derechos’, ‘política’, ‘lucha’, ‘movimiento’,etc. De hecho, los términos negativos son poquitos.

We thought that the word cloud about “feminism” would portray a negative view about it, but when we conducted the search on this word, we noticed that, in fact, it includes several positive aspects associated to feminism, such as “equality”, “rights”, “politics”, “struggle”, “movement”, etc. As a matter of fact, the negative terms are few.

According to the word cloud, how has feminism been represented in the media?

La lucha social, las organizaciones, colectivos ,grupos de mujeres que están constantemente haciendo esta lucha, están bastante invisibilizados por los medios de comunicación. De hecho, en una aplicación salieron las noticias más rankeadas, las más visitadas, era como unas diez o quince y busqué noticia por noticia, pero ninguna hablaba acerca de grupos, de organizaciones ni de mujeres emblemáticas; no logré ver nada acerca del feminismo.

The social struggle, the organizations, collectives, the women’s groups who are constantly conducting this fight are made invisible by media. In fact, I looked in an app that showed the most ranked and visited news, there were around ten or fifteen, and I looked one by one but none of them talked about groups, organizations, or emblematic women; I couldn’t find anything about feminism.

How should feminisim be represented in the media?

Partiendo de lo más básico que sería el concepto de lo que es el feminismo, partiendo desde ahí sería el aporte para tener desde un mismo concepto, no solamente como el término más buscado del año, en el diccionario, en la definición que dice la RAE (Real Academia Española), sino en sí lo que de verdad es el feminismo, lo que busca, cuáles son sus preceptos, entonces sí sería bastante interesante. A propósito de esto, en la plataforma se pueden buscar como dos o tres términos a la vez, y ahí yo creo que encontré un poco más de información o de términos que se acercaban a lo que realmente quería encontrar o debería encontrar.

It would be important for it to start with the basics, with what is the concept of feminism, so that we could have one same concept, not only as the most common search of the year in the dictionary, the definition offered by the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy), but what feminism really is, what it stands for, what are its goals, that would be interesting. In this sense, Media Cloud allows to search multiple words at once, and then I think I found a little bit more of information or of terms that were closer to what I really wanted to find or thought I should find.

This is part of a Rising Frames series developed in close collaboration with the organization El Churo based in Quito, Ecuador. They organized a workshop held on April 21, 2018 that brought together representatives from various collectives and groups to examine how they or issues they care about are represented in a collection of Ecuadorian media and to create stories in response.