For the past month and a half, I have been busy summarizing the knowledge from each course and completing differnet assignments. Many of the courses have provided me with powerful insights and inspirations, which I will elaborate on in the following blogs.

Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion is a really wonderful course that has helped me understand many implict concepts of online discussion. It has given me a different perspective to critically view discussions on social media.

Tools

I have also learned various text analysis tools such as Gephi graph, word cloud, and sentiment analysis, which will be helpful for my future research. I plan to use these methods for analysis in my project.

Literatures

This course has introduced me to the field of social network analysis, and many articles on analyzing online discussions in social networks have inspired me. I gradually realize that a significant portion of the literature in my project will be related to this field.

Assignment

The teacher asked us to scrape and analyze discussions on Reddit, and I specifically focused on discussions related to Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). I found that people tend to use their own experiences and stories as evidence in their arguments, and there are more responses to such arguments.

During the analysis of these discussions, I made unexpected findings that people may associate high sensitivity with autism or even have certain stereotypes. I plan to search for relevant literature on physiology to address this issue in my project and provide insights on the topic of HSP.

I am really fortunate to have taken this course and gained unexpected insights. I will further explore the directions mentioned above in my project research.