ZC – Data Cultures

Posted on November 24, 2018 by ZC

Data Visualization is Coming

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

In reading the blog post about Paul Revere there are a lot of really cool things to be discovered. First is the utility of networks in visualizing all sorts of information. from connections to people to connections from people to places and all sorts of other things. As a math major it’s always nice when I see a concept that I learned in a math class be used in a different context with extreme seamlessness and usefulness. Then looking at measures like centrality and betweenness of a node and seeing that number have a real world interpretation is also very satisfying to me. I really like this post, it’s fun, there some cool stuff in it and it definitely helps reinforce the stuff we’re learning about metadata and networks. As csamuelson points out: the article is entertaining and educational and an all around great read.

Posted on November 24, 2018 by ZC

All About Perspective

This article raises a few interesting points about text. Specifically I’m interested in the availability of texts. They mentioned that sometimes texts are abundant in one discipline. So abundant that it an be difficult to get through all of the texts and find what is relevant to the topic someone is looking into. Other times there is so little text available on a topic that it can limit research like user Jnichols99 astutely points out. However when text is available there is the problem of visualizing such large amounts of text in a way hat people can extrapolate meaning from it. Then there is also the problem of presenting a visualization that people can interact with and explore to fit their own individual interests. Ultimately, visualization is very subjective and comes down to what is the purpose of the visualization. What may serve as a good visualization for one person for one purpose may be a bad visualization for another person or another purpose.

Posted on October 11, 2018 by ZC

Money = Happiness?

Again this looks like a study that claims to do great research about a cool topic only to be full of subjective questions which causes misleading data. Theodossiou’s work in studying the relationship between employment status and mental well-being is definitely intriguing but I questions many of the methods. To begin with, the data used comes from a sample of 7897 individuals, a sample that is too small in my opinion. Next, the respondent questions are hard to interpret and leave room for confounding variables. One of the questions is “Have you recently been feeling reasonably happy, all things considered?”. I take offense to this questions because it can elicit responses unrelated to employment based happiness. Recent death in the family as well as many other factors play into psychological well-being and I’m not seeing work done to control for them. Even the scale is subjective as pointed out by cmcclancy. Phrases like “as usual” are open to interpretation and vary from person to person. All in all, not a fan of the work done in this paper.

Posted on October 4, 2018 by ZC

Same-Sex Different Wage

I was not a fan of this study to be honest. The methods of information gathering seemed extremely subjective and I’m not sure that anyone can take it that seriously. Even the author admits that they have to make a lot of estimations and concessions just for the sake of completing the study. User “Omaji” spoke well when they said the data has a large human social depth. I’m just not sure that it’s that reliable. Underreporting is something that can’t be accounted for as well as the other variables mentioned and not mentioned by the author. In summary, I just find the whole thing misleading.

Posted on October 2, 2018 by ZC

Psychohistory for psychos

If I’m being honest, I enjoyed the psycho history reading. It was pretty fun and felt like it come out of a futuristic sci-fi novel. The problem is I don’t actually know where it comes from. Echoing the concerns of “Sjalloway” I’m not sure what the context or background of this story is at all. Who are the characters, what are they doing, what is “Trantor”. None of these questions seem relevant to our coursework, or maybe they should be. I’m not sure at all where psychohistory fits in to our course. In fact I’m not sure where it fits in at all. The process seems rather arbitrary and I don’t know what information is backing what they are doing. Additionally, why is it called psychohistory if it is primarily math based. This reading leaves me very confused about what I’m looking at and I’m hoping things will get cleared up in class.