BL – Data Cultures

Posted on November 2, 2018 by BL

Class 10.1 Reading Response – Feminist Data Visualization

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This article really provides an interesting take on data visualization, incorporating a much more humanistic perspective. It furthers the idea for me that data can very much be subjectively created, and in doing, can be altered depending on how it is chosen to be recorded. It supports the importance of the role of data in telling story, and questions some more traditional ways that we have been doing so. One aspect of the article that caught my eye was rethinking the representation of gender in “binaristic categories”, a notion that is closely related with computers and data. How this could be adapted to change how we think about data is something that I’d very curious to learn more about . It makes me think about other ways that we as humans think in a binaristic manner, and ways that we could potentially change this way of thinking.

Posted on October 30, 2018 by BL

Class 9.2 Reading Response – Finding Paul Revere

This article was a really cool example showing the impact that data visualization on a given analysis. The author of this article used a web/network type structure to show the results of certain connections of a general matrix through links. Through this analysis, he was able to create a “social” network between certain people who lived over 200 years ago. We discovered, through this largely exploratory analysis, that Paul Revere was at the center of this network. He could also do this using centrality scores, which is a useful metric that I learned from this article as well. Similar to my colleague’s response to last week’s article, some of the statistical results were slightly confusing, but I understand the methodology for the most part for the analysis. I’d be interested in pursuing using centrality scores and these types of networks in some of our notebooks!

Posted on October 27, 2018 by BL

Class 9.1 Reading Response – Reconstructing Historical Social Networks

This article was particularly interesting to read given that I’ve actually thought about how difficult it must be to understand specific human social interactions before everything was so digitized, which wasn’t that long ago at all. Now, going back almost 200 more years and trying to understand interactions would be much more difficult. Using biographical data would make sense under these circumstances, as there aren’t many clear indicators of social interactions in more historical time periods that would provide enough data points, as it was mentioned that letters are clearly good indicators of social interactions but doesn’t represent full populations by any means. In response to my colleague’s post, I think it’s interesting to see the conjunction of historians and computer scientists, and how useful having a strong background of data analysis can be when attempting to better understand history, especially given how hard it can be to interpret certain sources of historical information.

Posted on October 24, 2018 by BL

Class 8.2 Reading Response – Topic Modeling for Women’s History

This article demonstrated a very practical use for topic modeling by looking at trends in women’s history, attempting to debunk certain myths and popular beliefs. It looked at over half a million abstracts throughout this process, which clearly will provide a lot of data points. An interesting aspect that my colleague discusses in relation to topic modeling that I hadn’t considered is the issue with specificity, or lack thereof. Especially when only looking at abstracts from these articles, there can be a lack of specificity involved with this analysis. At the same time, a topic modeling analysis looking at the entirety of the articles would be a much more time consuming and expensive process, given the sheer influx of words and data points. I think in certain cases, there can be a tradeoff between specificity with the data and the actual quantity of data that you have to work with. It is up to the analyst as to what he or she values more. In the case of this article, I think that having more data points and only using the abstracts was the correct decision, as the purpose of the article was to conduct an analysis of all of women’s history. Given this, they would likely want to include as many data points as possible.

Posted on October 22, 2018 by BL

Class 8.1 Reading Response – Text Analysis and Visualization

I thought this article was particularly interesting in the realm of data visualization. When looking at data, not only is it really important to have an good understanding of the raw data and ways to manipulate it, but it is almost equally important to be able to portray this data in a meaningful way. There are many very exciting ways that people have visualized data, and I think you can be especially creative when the data is in the form of text. I also think that data visualization can be especially important given how it can be very difficult to analyze text by itself. I appreciate my classmate’s blog post that emphasizes a balance when it comes to this. While various creative visuals may enhance the reader’s experience, one must also maintain the core messages and conclusions behind the data itself.

Posted on October 11, 2018 by BL

Class 6.2 Reading Response – Unemployment and Well-Being

This article was very informative in terms of how the status of being “unemployed” can have a really negative impact on the psychological well-being of people in comparison to somebody who was employed in a low-paid job. One thing that I mentioned in my annotation for this article was the idea of a “discouraged worker”, an economic concept which describes an adult between 18-65 years old (legal employment age) and has not found employment after long-term unemployment. During this time however, this person was originally actively seeking employment, and eventually became discouraged to the point where they would be considered to have left the workforce because they stop seeking employment. I’d be curious to see how this concept would play into the article because this would most likely represent the lowest psychological well-being of somebody who has not only become unemployed, but has been classified as leaving the workforce in its entirety. I think in general, the article was well-written and used survey data really well. Building off this blogpost (http://courses.shroutdocs.org/dcs104-fall2018/2018/10/08/simpsons-paradox-is-the-data-telling-the-right-story/) from one of my classmates, I believe that it address a really important concept of how data can tell a story. In the context of this article, the data is telling a story, but is the story complete without considering the concept of a “discouraged worker”?

Posted on October 4, 2018 by BL

Class 6.1 Reading Response – Simpson’s Paradox

I thought this article was particularly interesting and relatable to my Economic Statistics class that I took sophomore year given the complexities that arise when looking at proportions and probabilities and such. Something that echo’s a bit of what many people have said in last weeks post is the importance of being transparent with your statistics and the data you use. After reading the first example in this article, I could easily state that a greater proportion of females are being accepted into graduate schools in comparison to males. However, after further analysis using the “combined” method, I can also conclude that a greater proportion of males are being accepted into graduate school. When somebody is presenting an unbiased pice of work, it is especially important to acknowledge the whole story and be thorough with their analysis.

Posted on September 25, 2018October 2, 2018 by BL

Class 5.2 Reading Response – The Changing State of Recidivism

I think this a very interesting article that reflects important trends in recidivism in the United States. The analysis demonstrates that in some states, the percentage of incarcerated people returning to prison after three years has been decreasing. It cites the importance of new programs and re-entry policies that have benefited former inmates as one of the main reasons for this decline in recidivism. While this article makes some good points, I don’t think it can accurately reflect the United States as a whole. In certain analyses, it can be perfectly fine to use a random sample to reflect greater population. However, an analysis that identifies trends in prison statistics should warrant a more complete data collection process from each state to more accurately reflect how things are changing in our country. This is especially true because the data that is being used is not a random sample, rather it is the only data available.