Narrative

Project Overview

Our Digital Humanities project aims to visualize, analyze and provide data-driven context on the recent rise of fan engagement and media visibility for the Women's National Basketball Association(WNBA). Our project focuses heavily on how recent media discussions have shaped national support for the WNBA. Our work combines historical analysis and media tracking mechanisms to create interactive visualizations that explore how media has amplified the voices of star-athletes and contributed to a cultural shift surrounding the perception of women's basketball.

This project is meant to understand the changing narrative surrounding the public support for the WNBA through the lens of Digital Humanities. We believe that using feminist and humanistic perspectives to interrogate these trends is crucial for uncovering invisible power dynamics that have oppressed women's sports. While the rise of star players like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese has brought unprecedented attention to the league, structural inequalities continue to shape dynamics in the sport and affect the athletes.

Our Research Question:

How have discussions on mainstream media shaped national enthusiasm and support for the WNBA?

Introduction/Research Topic

The surge in fan engagement and general popularity for the WNBA in the last few years has shown a changing narrative in how mainstream media outlets report on women's professional basketball. According to the Global Sports Properties Report, the WNBA experienced a 322% increase in global online searches compared to its four-year average, which has cemented the WNBA as on of the fastest growing sports leagues in the world in 2024.

While star athletes like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have contributed to increased visibility, our project specifically focuses on the evolution of mainstream media coverage itself rather than just the athletes'. We are particularly interested in how prominent media outlets have shaped public perception of the WNBA through news headlines, editorial tone, sentiment in media posts, and thematic focus.

Our Digital Humanities project aims to systematically analyze the following:

How the frequency, sentiment, and topics of WNBA related media coverage have evolved since the leagues inception.
Whether these shifts in media sentiment and intensity align with trends in game attendance and fan interest.
The narratives that media sources have built around the league and how they have challenged or reinforced historical narratives surrounding women in professional sports.

By combining data analysis of media headlines and social media posts with visualizations and historical timelines detailing fan engagement and the history of the league, this project seeks to provide a clearer understanding of the relationship between media representation and public enthusiasm for the WNBA.

Historical Context

The WNBA was founded in 1996, in the wake of the U.S. women’s basketball team’s gold medal performance at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics (WNBA). The league's inaugural season began in 1997 with just eight teams (WNBA). While the early years saw considerable hype due to the league's novelty and support from the NBA, media coverage and fan support fluctuated over the next two decades (WNBA). Unlike its male counterpart, the WNBA faced persistent challenges in marketing, sponsorship, broadcast visibility, and cultural relevance and never quite became one of America's major sports leagues.

Throughout the 2000s, star players like Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, and Diana Taurasi helped build a loyal following among fans, but national attention remained sporadic. A pivotal shift began in the late 2010s, driven in part by the rise of media. Platforms like news, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok gave WNBA players direct access to the public, enabling them to shape their own narratives, advocate for social justice, and build personal brands (Nast). In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and national protests for racial justice, the WNBA gained new attention from the public for its collective activism (Nast). Players used their platform to demand systemic change. Notably, the Atlanta Dream publicly opposed their then-owner Kelly Loeffler due to her right-wing political views (Nast). Many respected the WNBA's moral stances, which attracted new media attention and fan interest.

In recent years, rising stars such as A'ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu, and Caitlin Clark have helped usher in a new era of visibility (Reuters Staff). In 2024, the NCAA women’s basketball tournament broke viewership records, feeding directly into the WNBA draft buzz (Thomas). Finally, the greatly increased media coverage and fan engagement of the WNBA in 2025 is a reflection of the league entering the mainstream. Our timeline below concisely illustrates the decades of labor, activism, and media evolution that all culminated in the WNBA finally breaking into widespread popularity. Although the players worked hard over those decades, they rarely got much recognition for it. It is important to study how and why things have changed in the last year to understand what factors (social, cultural, and technological) finally aligned to make that recognition possible.

Thesis and League growth

With these shifts in visibility and media engagement in mind, our DH project aims to investigate one central question: How have discussions on mainstream media shaped national enthusiasm and support for the WNBA? We are particularly interested in how media, specifically newspapers/news sites, have become key areas where the public shape the narrative surrounding women’s sports. While athletes like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have brought unprecedented visibility to the WNBA through their online presence, we are also interested in how that visibility has shifted the tone of the mainstream media and how the league is portrayed.

Major media outlets, such as the New York Times and Bleacher Report, that previously provided minimal coverage of the WNBA are now dedicating more and more attention to the league. A New York Times article discusses how “in recent years, women’s sports have had significant growth… Globally, the number of sponsorships in women’s professional leagues increased 22 percent in 2023, compared with a 24 percent increase in men’s sports.” (Nerkar) This narrowing sponsorship gap suggests that corporate stakeholders are finally recognizing the value and market potential of women’s sports, and in turn, we are seeing media outlets responding accordingly.

One clear indicator of the league's growing prominence was highlighted by Bleacher Report who found that “WNBA games averaged 9,807 fans per regular-season game in 2024, a 48 percent increase over the 2023 season.”(Stumbaugh) This surge in regular-season viewership and attendance, which can also be seen on our dashboard below, suggests massive amounts of increased fan-engagement and also a deeper cultural movement, one that drives beyond TV viewership, and into real-world arenas.

Our preliminary thesis is that there is a cultural momentum that has been building that is massively boosting visibility for the WNBA. New media attetnion is creating new opportunities for athletes to build brands, form communities, and gain traction. Throughout our project we hope to map out how online sentiment and media trends both challenge and reinforce these dynamics.

Tools Used

We have been using tools such as Google Colab, Visual Studio Code, Tableau, Streamlit, Flourish, TimelineJS, Google Trend, and Google Sites for our project analysis and presents our findings in a visually accessible and engaging way. Each tool offers distinct advantages that align with our goals to analyze social media discourse around the WNBA. Therefore, this reflects how discourse ties into broader cultural and feminist shifts.

Google Colab and Visual Studio Code serve as our primary platforms for data preprocessing and exploratory analysis. Its compatibility with Python (programming language) and cloud-based collaboration tools makes it suited to our team’s workflow. We plan to use Google Colab to clean and organize data collected from a mix of sources, including existing datasets and web-scraped content from online platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and official WNBA pages. Colab supports the type of flexible and iterative analysis we need such as identifying patterns of engagement levels and changes over time while allowing us to document and share code efficiently as a group.

Tableau, Streamlit, Flourish, and Google Trend are used for data visualization and interactive dashboards. Since our project centers on trends in public engagement and sentiment over time, these tools had helped create time series charts, heatmaps, and dashboards. We been visualize changes in engagement across different periods such as spikes around major WNBA events or athlete milestones to highlight how visibility has evolved. These tools also allow us to create interactive dashboards that let users explore engagement trends across key WNBA events. Viewers can filter by player, platform, or date range to interpret the rise of social media discourse around women’s basketball for themselves. This interactivity offers insights that raw statistics alone cannot communicate. Therefore, it aligns with Drucker’s argument that visualizations are not just representations of data, but interpretive tools that shape how knowledge is produced and understood (Drucker 2011).

TimelineJS was used to build an interactive timeline showcasing accomplishments and major moments of the WNBA throughout its 28 year existence. The tool allowed us to combine text, images, and video to create a dynamic visual narrative that traces the league’s evolution from its founding in 1996 to the present day. We highlighted key milestones such as championship wins, groundbreaking player achievements, and moments of social activism. By presenting this information in a chronological and interactive format, we aimed to help viewers better understand how decades of progress and struggle have led to the WNBA's recent surge in visibility and cultural relevance.

We used Google Sites to design and build our final project website. The platform allows us to integrate our interactive Tableau dashboard, written analysis, and visualizations for display on the website. By formatting our website to be easy to navigate and engaging for the general public, we hope to uphold the ideals of DH in its commitment to accessibility, relevance, and social engagement.

Each tool supports a different part of our research process, from computation to visualization and lastly presentation. After combining these tools, it has helped strengthen both the depth of our analysis and clarity of our final product. Most importantly, all the tools we chose are free and cloud-based which makes them also accessible to the broader public. We aim for this approach to reflect the ethical, accessible, and collaborative values of DH, which emphasize openness and public engagement in scholarship (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020).

The visualization below traces how headline tone has evolved over time. Before 2017 coverage was minimal, but from 2019 onward story counts rose sharply. Neutral headlines led the way at first, but by 2023 positive headlines grew rapidly alongside neutral ones. Negative coverage also increased but at a slower pace. The dramatic jump in positive and neutral stories in 2024 and 2025 mirrors the surge in media engagement around breakout stars and big moments. It shows that as online conversations about the WNBA intensify, mainstream news outlets respond with more frequent and more positive reporting.

This Trends chart charts public curiosity about the WNBA and about Caitlin Clark over the last two decades. From 2004 until around 2018 search volumes for both terms held at very low, steady levels. Beginning in 2019 there is a gentle rise in searches for the league, reflecting growing online conversations and occasional spikes around draft day or season openers.

In early 2024 the red series for Caitlin Clark skyrockets, corresponding to her record-breaking NCAA tournament run and ensuing media attention. Almost simultaneously the blue series for the league itself surges into the top tier of the scale. This synchronization shows that when media narratives around a breakout star ignite national chatter, that chatter translates directly into a broader public wanting to learn more about the entire league.

Since then both the athlete-specific and league-wide search interest have remained elevated, with repeated peaks at key moments such as her WNBA debut and marquee matchups. Because Google Trends data are independent of social platforms, they offer a clear signal that media–driven conversations generate real-world curiosity and support. This pattern ties directly to our central question by demonstrating how online discourse around players helps drive measurable increases in national enthusiasm for the WNBA.

Our visualization shows that sports are the most frequently mentioned on news media platforms. The chart breaks down news coverage by topic and shows the balance of negative, neutral, and positive tone for each. Coverage of pure sports stories dominates, followed by business and media angles. Within sports stories, positive headlines substantially outnumber negative ones, suggesting that the league is increasingly portrayed in a favorable light. Business and media stories also lean positive, though neutral coverage remains strong. More advocacy-oriented topics such as activism or pay equity receive very little attention, and what they do receive skews mostly neutral. This distribution tells us that mainstream outlets are focusing on the athletic and commercial sides of the WNBA far more than on broader cultural or equity issues, and when they do cover the league it is more often with an upbeat or promotional slant.

Throughout the years, we can see that media coverage increase significantly for WNBA. To ensure transparency and avoid bias in how we categorized WNBA media headlines, we developed a systematic tagging process based on manually curated keyword lists, automated sentiment analysis, and iterative refinement through exploratory data analysis (EDA).

The playable slideshow below highlights specific spikes in Google search activity for the WNBA and connects them to major events, like a new president or a new playoff format. The visualization revealed a clear shift in what drives public interest in the WNBA. For much of the league’s history, most major search upticks were tied to institutional events like the Olympics, changes in playoff format, or general league milestones, rather than individual players. The only major early exception was the 2004 “Three to See” draft class. However, starting around 2024, the pattern changes and spikes in search interest became more closely tied to specific players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and others dominating the conversation. This shift demonstrates how the league's visibility is increasingly driven by star power and individual narratives, signaling a new era where players themselves are central to shaping the WNBA’s cultural relevance.

The graph on the left, taken from our interactive dashboard, illustrates how attendance to WNBA has trended since the league's inception. The league experienced its greatest average attendance when it began, reaching roughly 10,900 average attendees. Over the next 20 years, however, fan involvement plateaued, largely hovering at the 8000 mark. Following the pandemic, attendance skyrocketed from record-low numbers in 2021 to its highest average attendance since 1998, roughly 10,800.

This figure from our dashboard plots the preexisting attendance data (aggregated monthly instead of yearly here) against the Google search data represented in the Flourish visualization. It's important to note that the peaks of the search trends align with the peaks of attendance as the season begins and ends. Furthermore, Google searches for the WNBA spikes around 2021, experiencing explosive growth that is directly in line with that of fan attendance.

This third graph similarly overlays average attendance (grouped by month) and mentions of the WNBA in the media over the last 30 years. What's notable is that the number of media mentions follows a similar pattern as attendance and Google searches, remaining relatively regular until experiencing a unprecedented uptick following 2021 and continuing till today. Based on the fact that the growth of both measures of online interest and attendance occur simultaneously and near proportionately, it seems plausible there is a relationship at play.

Conclusion

From our analysis of more than 5,000 WNBA-related headlines spanning three decades, the public attendance trend dataset, and the history timeline for context, a clear picture emerges of how women's professional basketball has been discussed. It was shown that the league was often underrepresented in mainstream media. While we found strong coverage of game results, player stats, and business milestones, we also uncovered critical gaps. Topics tied to gender equity, activism, and intersectionality make up only a small fraction of total headlines, and when they do appear, they are frequently framed with neutral or negative sentiment.

Our project also reflects the core values of Accessibility Theory (Kelly, Otis, and Brett). We built interactive dashboards that support screen readers, include alt text, and use high contrast visuals to ensure that our findings are not just visible, but legible and usable by all. In doing so, we upheld the digital humanities commitment to public scholarship that does not gatekeep information but opens it up for inquiry, critique, and empowerment. Most importantly, this work is not just backward looking. It is forward facing. It calls on scholars to build on our findings by studying similar dynamics in other leagues such as the NWSL or EuroLeague Women. It invites journalists to use our visual tools when reporting on how social media affects attendance. It asks fans to go beyond cheering on social media and advocate for meaningful change in how women’s sports are funded, scheduled, and staffed. And it encourages digital humanities practitioners to treat proxy data, narrative gaps, and interface design as opportunities for social intervention.

The rise of players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and A’ja Wilson has clearly contributed to a surge in national interest. While we did not analyze social media content directly, our dataset shows that media coverage mentioning these athletes has significantly increased in volume in the past two years. Headlines often frame them as cultural icons, breakout stars, or catalysts for league growth. This rise in attention represents a shift in how women’s basketball is valued—but it is uneven. The emotional framing of these headlines tends to celebrate athletic success, yet often ignores the structural inequalities players continue to face, such as pay disparities, racial bias, or lack of institutional support.

Our findings affirm that visibility alone is not equity. While increased media coverage signals progress, the kinds of stories that get told, and those that don’t, continue to shape public narratives around legitimacy, labor, and value in women’s sports. Our project, through data-driven storytelling and critical visualization, contributes to a more nuanced and accountable representation of WNBA athletes. We hope it inspires further work that not only tracks popularity, but also challenges the conditions that shape who gets seen, how they are framed, and whose voices remain unheard.

Methodologies Used

The first and perhaps the most evident theory that was a critical part of our early stages of development is D’Ignazio and Klein’s theory of data feminism. This theory encouraged us to view our data with an intersectional lens early on, driving our interest in the WNBA as a research topic due to the persistent conversation surrounding its gender dynamics with the NBA. In addition, D’Ignazio and Klein’s argument that data feminism is a means to examine power dynamics specifically motivated our decision to study social media as a variable because of how much influence it wields in the modern world. Social media functions as a sort of digital megaphone and as a result, gets to decide whose individual voice is amplified and and whose is not, tying to the idea that “feminism is about power - who has it and who doesn’t.” (D’Ignazio, Klein) This is closely related to our sentiment analysis of media coverage over the month of May, which illustrates whether the voices being elevated on social media are positive, negative, or neutral.

Additionally, as Yasamin Rezai underlines as a core principle of D’Ignazio and Klein’s work, we seek to consider context. According to her, “letting the numbers speak for themselves is viewed as unethical and undemocratic.” (Rezai) This is integral to our methodology as our goal is to contextualize the recent growth in the WNBA’s attention against the background of social media rather than just restate the growth itself. In tune with D’Ignazio and Klein’s definition of data feminism, there are a number of power dynamics that could be examined for the purposes of our project, but among them social media is the most effective contextualizer because of how many people it engages with across the world and therefore the sheer amount of conversation it generates about the NBA and WNBA every second.

As for the frontend of our project, data accessibility is an important piece of theory we are drawing inspiration from. Drawing from Brett, Otis, and Kelly, who contend that accessibility in data is a moral obligation, we’ve integrated accessibility into our design process, front to back. For example, we have designed a Streamlit dashboard that maximizes interactivity so that users are able to adjust options based on their accessibility needs. Users can filter graphs to make them more or less granular depending on their needs, toggle the size of the text to tune to their visual capacities, and figures have bright colors to make them easily distinguishable. Furthermore, we are looking to implement frontend add-ons such as a text-to-speech reader so that our written analyses can be interpreted by those with visual impairments.

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