Welcome to 2020 Winter
Case Appraisals
These are case appraisals I have done for my human-centered data science course. In this course, we have learned about the issues, challenges, and opportunities faced by big data. Thus, in the appraisals, students were given four case studies on transforming the social world into data. We should identify the differences and similarities across these studies in terms of their research questions, claims and methods. Then, we should synthesize the key arguments across these four studies to come up with our own critical reflection about the methods selected and the conclusions of the studies.
The summary of key theories and methods used in the four studies.
Compare and contrast of four studies
Research Claims from the four case studies：
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There is a distinct space producing Black-centered narratives on Twitter.
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Facebook Pages provide a platform for western voters to address their anger and lack of trust.
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There are possibilities of social media analytics for patient experiences of cystic fibrosis.
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There are unknown biases resulted from online self-censorship and online self-representation to current social media studies.
Although these four case studies explored questions in different areas, they all demonstrated the methodological opportunities and challenges of transforming the phenomenon in the social world into statistics.
Main opportunities:
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the special design of the architecture of social media platforms
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the rapid data collection process
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various research methods serve different purposes
Main Challenges:
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biases resulted from data collection and sampling process
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representation bias: when pulling data from social media platforms, researchers tend to sort these data by keywords which can make the data set not that representative. Sometimes researchers can only interview a certain number of participants, so they cannot make sure that these participants are representative enough.
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online self-representation bias: users tend to show their better selves online which prevents researchers from knowing the truth solely from the online posts.
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the technical limitation of downloading data from social media platforms
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some data analytic tools can only allow downloading a certain number of posts or data from social media platforms so that not all data are covered.
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some data analytic tools can only examine textual data, while there are many other forms of data that are valuable.
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statement of consent
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researchers have to be cautious about the consent given by the participants on utilizing their personal data.
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Field Study at Student Services Center
For our records management course, we have done a field observation about the process of records keeping and management in the student services center at our faculty. Our team focused on the information practices of the career officer, Julie, and her task of helping students to select their practicum placements.
This is a group project and the final product was made together by the group.
My role:
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communicated with the career officer about our group project and interview purpose
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asked interview questions while my teammates were taking notes
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emailed the career officer to further clarify and followup about the interviews
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wrote the implication and limitation section of the final report
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edited and proofread the final report
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gave the presentation on what we have done
We have examined Julie's roles and responsibilities, reporting line, the structure of the student services center, Julie's records-keeping tools, and her routine workflow. Then, in our final report, we first depicted what we have observed and got form the interviews. We then made a guess based on the information we have about the organizational culture, power distance, and the rules-following habits about Julie and the student services center. At the end of our final report, we analyzed the records-keeping process and offered some suggestions.
Research Paper on Preservation of Born-Digital News
Class Presentation on Workplace Issues
In the course, Practicum Prep, we have explored many aspects of the future workplace and aimed to develop our self-learning skills during our practicum in Summer 2020. One topic was to explore some popular news about workplace issues, share them with the class and talk about the implications of this news.
I shared the story of Susan Fowler, a former Uber employee. She was unequally treated in Uber as an intern because she was a female. In the first couple of weeks during her internship, she refused the proposition from her supervisor. When her supervisor harassed her several times, she decided to report him to the human resources department. However, the HR team said because the supervisor was very efficient in the work, the HR team could not do anything about it. Then, Fowler encountered many situations where female employees were in inferior positions when it came to the selection and promotion period.
From this story, I shared a concept with the class, occupational sexism. Occupational sexism is sexism at the workplace where women are unequally treated primarily because of the gender. I presented my own takeaways from the story: ask multiple people for help, record the evidence of potential harassment, and don't be shy. In our future workplace, as women, we should always keep in mind that the tasks we have done are valuable and should be given the same respect as males. Furthermore, we should also know that there are many resources and people we can reach out.
