AW – Data Cultures

Posted on November 1, 2018 by AW

9.2 Reading

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In the article, “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere,” I thought the author presented a very interesting way of analyzing and presenting data. They started out by using a certain amount of organizations and then looking at what each person in their list was a part of, which limited the amount of organizations that they were looking at. If they did it the other way around, a lot more organizations could have been brought up, making the data set even bigger and more difficult to deal with. From there, they were able to invert the table and find different associations between different people. I had never thought of this approach before, but it seems like it is very effective. One of my classmates noted that they liked the tone in which the author wrote the article because it seemed like a “class lecture or tutorial.” However, I felt as though that type of tone wasn’t necessary and drew away from the interesting and informational work he was presenting. When the author said that they couldn’t “show [readers] the whole Person by Person matrix, because [the author] would have to kill [the reader],” it made me pause and distracted me from the reading I was supposed to be paying attention to.

Posted on October 30, 2018 by AW

9.1 Reading

In the article, “A Report HasCome Here,” the purpose was to analyze the challenges that historians face when trying to uncover life during slavery. One of my peers mentioned that, “many people during that time did not know how to read and write, causing for a lack in written history evidence.” I agree with this statement, but I think that that could be said for a lot of horrific events during world history. For example, during the Holocaust or big bombings, there was not a lot of evidence or writings left behind for historians to read and get a genuine account for everything that happened. This study can and should be used for other events throughout history so that we can get a better idea of the information that has been lost.

Posted on October 24, 2018 by AW

8.2 Reading

One of my peers commented that they, “hadn’t considered the issue with specificity, or lack thereof” when it came to topic modeling. They continue, saying, “Especially when only looking at abstracts from these articles, there can be a lack of specificity involved with this analysis.” However, when you are looking at thousands of articles, it is tedious to look through all of them when there are alternative options that give you the most important information. In the article, “What,Where, When, and Sometimes Why: Data Mining Two Decades of Women’s History Abstracts,” the author used text modeling to analyze a little over half a million essays and articles about women’s history. This, in my opinion, is the most efficient way to go about this because I am sure that there were moments within in each article or essay where the author spoke on things that weren’t important to their overall point, and having the ability to skip over or omit these insignificant portions makes the process much quicker. While I can see where my classmate was coming from, this method is just to maximize useful time.

Posted on October 22, 2018 by AW

8.1 Reading

One of my classmates mentioned, “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.” One of the ways that this can be done is through word clouds. The article mentions that word clouds are “static” and not very interactive, which doesn’t allow people to explore it. However, it is still pretty creative. While it is not the most fun, it maximizes your time because you are drawn to the words and topics that are most important throughout whatever article you would’ve had to sit down and read through. Everything is right in front of you, so you can skip over the less important things because it’s obvious which topics deserve your attention more. The article spoke on videos and other forms of relaying information that are entertaining, but with those methods you would still have to listen to and watch information that you don’t need to.

Posted on October 15, 2018 by AW

7.1 Reading

In the article, “Words that Have Made History, or Modeling the Dynamics of Linguistic Changes,” the author discusses how language has changed over time. Regarding this, one of my classmates wrote that they “feel like taking random words to see changes in certain words or certain parts of the language may not be very effective .” I agree with this statement because the article didn’t do a very good job of making clear what exactly their steps were to determine how this language has changed. Like many of the other articles we have read, they don’t use language that would make it easy for readers to grasp exactly what their plan is. If the reader is unable to fully understand, then it is hard to believe what is being written about and find it effective. Along with this, the article itself says that there are many potential problems with how they could collect this data. For example, it says, “These methods, however, share a common drawback, namely their results are by no means stable. Also, no cross-validation can be considered a downside.” Later it reads, “any attempts at finding direct correlations between historical events and stylistic breaks are subject to human prejudices, and therefore might introduce substantial bias to the results.” While there is always some sort of error, the lack of a proper explanation doesn’t allow for the reader to understand how the person conducting the experiment accounted for them.

Posted on October 11, 2018 by AW

6.2 Reading

The article, “The effects of low-pay and unemployment on psychological well-being: A logistic regression approach,” speaks on the correlation between unemployment and mental distress. The results showed that, generally, if you are unemployed, you are more likely to encounter mental distress. One of my peers mentioned that, “Since this study was conducted in a relatively strong economic period, [he/she] would assume most people out of the labor market would be due to choice and their psychological well-being would not be affected. [He/She] was surprised to see that being out of the labor force had significant effects on well-being for certain subgroups.” However, I think that despite how much an economy is prospering, there will still be those that face unemployment unwillingly. While there may be people who choose not to work, there are always a significant group that are struggling due to unemployment. This will ultimately leave an impact on you, which was seen by the data given in the article.

Posted on October 9, 2018 by AW

6.1 Reading

In the article, “Mortality in the North Dublin Union during the Great Famine,” the authors bring up the idea that underlying factors should be considered when we interpret data given to us. They give the example of workhouses during the famine. While one workhouse could have an impecable survival rate, it could be because they had less severe cases to attend to. On the other hand, a workhouse that had a high percentage of deaths could have had people near-death come to them, making their jobs a lot harder. An idea like this- that data is dependent on the individual’s situation- should be considered when we analyze all data. Background information should always be given so we have context and can approach the data with full knowledge on the situation. Without it, people could assume that those workhouses with better survival rates are much better than those with lower rates, when in actuality we don’t know if they are better due to the differences in the cases they received.

Posted on October 3, 2018 by AW

5.2 Reading

The article, “The Changing State of Recidivism: Fewer People Going Back to Prison,” and its methodology omit a lot of data that would make its study stronger and more comprehendible. For example, they only take into account twenty three out of the fifty states. That is less than half, meaning that a lot of data is being left out that could either prove their conclusion invalid or make it even stronger in the eyes of the reader. Also, while Pew had access to some things that BJS didn’t, such as access to all released prisoners every year, there were other things that they were restricted from. For example, they didn’t have access to FBI criminal history records, so they were unable to collect information on rearrests. Basically, there were a lot of gaps between what each study group could obtain data from. Toward the end of the article, it speaks on how reducing recidivism improves different things throughout society, yet there was no data to back that up either. The article just simply listed different things that it improves. Without evidence, it is hard to ensure your audience that what you’re saying is accurate.