One of the questions my group came up with was, how is space used on The Voice? For example perhaps the football game last Sunday is given a page and half worth of pages while a student protest is given just 2 columns. Another question was what type of content was included? We also asked who is the target audience? Did the target audience ever change as time went on? These questions are all interesting because a few show the priorities the editors for the voice had when it came to what information was shared. It also gives insight to just how many resources the editors and writers had just to be able to write about and share the information they gathered. (wasn’t able to upload image……kept talking about sever issues so enjoy the pretty colors) Photo site: Editors, Wooster Voice, “The Wooster Voice (Wooster, OH), 1969-02-28” (1969). The Voice: 1961-1970. 191.
https://openworks.wooster.edu/voice1961-1970/191

In terms of organizing a spreadsheet for the first question the goal would be to compare how much physical space(pages, columns, etc.) different topics receive. The rows would then be each article/item published in The Voice and columns would include; the title, date, category ( sports, campus events, politics), and an approximation of the exact amount of space used. For the question of type of content it would be more of less the same perhaps adding sub-categories or tone to help find keywords. For target audience rows would be, again, articles and columns would be things like; department, subject, tone

In terms of data privacy including student names would of course make if personally identifiable information. Articles about protest and personal stories and those involved most likely didn’t consent to being part of reaserch dataset. A way this could be handled carefully would be to anonymize authors, avoid storing personal details, and focus on content categories.

The Wooster Voice https://www.instagram.com/thewoostervoiceofficial/ © Copyright 2026 The Wooster Voice.

A few good questions were posed by my group. They mainly consisted of questions related to the composition of The Voice itself, such as the length of articles in the Sports section and how they relate to the performance of the team, and the changing ratios between local and national news stories published in the paper itself.

If we were to focus on the question of changing story scope in publication, a few keywords would need to be created. We would need to define what ‘scope’ really is in this case, but at a glance, we could divide all stories into 5 categories, those being non-campus articles, non-campus articles with mentions of impact on campus community, non-campus article with viewpoints from campus residents, campus article with mentions of non-campus events, campus article with little to no mention of non-campus events. These definitions are muddy and awful, but refinement would likely emerge as a result of actual work put in.

I have no concerns about data privacy in this dataset, as all information is publicly available, and has been published by people expecting the information they publish to be seen and analyzed by the public

Wooster Hazing frequency

My study of the Wooster Voice would track how often articles featuring or about hazing have appeared in the paper

The questions that we discussed as a group mostly pertained to what types of articles appeared in the Voice throughout the years and how often the paper had been engaged in plagiarism, though since I couldn’t find that article I’ve settled for the next best thing; hazing. It’s a topic I’ve noticed a few times throughout my viewing of the Voice and would assume it’s one that has become more frequent throughout the years. I think it’d be interesting to see the students perspective on something that’s recognized as a pretty frequent issue across the country.

My dataset and spreadsheet would most likely search the Voice’s archives for articles containing the words “haze”, “hazing” or any other related terms and sort by inclusion in the title and body, frequency of how often the word is used throughout the article, and the time that issue came out. I imagine this would be a pretty basic way to track not just how often students fin it interesting to write about but increasing with the College’s attempts to stop it. It would also be interesting to compare this to other college newspapers and general media coverage of hazing, which I feel has been ever increasing in recent years.

For privacy, names wouldn’t need to be included, authors or those included in the articles otherwise, though anyone with access to the Voice’s archives could theoretically look up the articles for themselves to find the potential increase in reports.

Image Credit: “Wooster Voice Front Page” 2/3/17 https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=voice2012-2020

Based on what my group talked about in class I think that we can ask questions like how do the topics that are talked about change over time. If you look at what they were talking about over the years you can see that at the time things like sports, actual student life and complaints, and politics or big events in the country were showing up way more than anything else. It’s interesting because it shows what was more important at different points in Wooster’s past because you see a difference in what students talk about today compared to what they talked about back then.

If I was to make a spreadsheet for this, I would make every row represent an article. The columns would be things like the date, the title of the article, the topic or the type of article, and the people or the groups that are being talked about. The hardest thing would be picking what info is actually worth putting on the spreadsheet. 

For privacy I think I would just make sure I am careful about what I use and how I’m using it, I wouldn’t really use anything I don’t have permission for unless it’s just open to the public. I will base how deep I go into using whatever info I am using based on how personal the information is.