Semester 2: Weeks 9-10

I have returned home, but sadly got sick on the plane! I have spent a lot of these weeks finishing assignments and collecting reading to help my methodology.

While finishing up these assignments I was able to assess the ethical limitations or risk of my study which was a great help. I am concerned about the narrowness of my scope, but I think given the timeframe it is better to be smaller and well done than large and lost. It is a tough pill for me to swallow, but I think that there are always going to be limitations or things to have been done differently. My main concern is the erasure of marginalized voices from the network and the output. I don’t want to create a system where people who are excluded from things like neighbour organisations or don’t have an opinionated online presents are erased from the narrative. This will have to be something that I either find good research on that allows me to implement safeguards into the network OR that I have a limitation + recommendations for addressing this gap in the future.

Another thing that has been really exciting is I have been officially onboarded with my project partner! I have gained a bunch of new insight into the partnership and the inner workings of the company. I am happy to have the support of some of their statisticians, but I learnt that they use R for their work which means that I will have to get my bearings with that programming language. I am also very happy to hear that they already have archival data that I was going to be looking for, so it saves me some digging which is nice. I have started working on my survey, but I am needing to still do some more background reading before I feel confident enough to send it out.I am happy that I was able to find a project that uses social theories in such a way though.

I have also started hoping that the network could be implemented into my partner’s website and a kind of NIMBY/Anti-rejuvination heat map. I don’t know if this will be fully operational by the time August comes around, but I think if I can make the framework for such a function it will benefit my project partner lots. The main benefit for them at the moment is that they will be able to see how their model is being received by the greater public. The company does have “champions” for different projects, but this can make it difficult to know if things are being accepted on a larger scale. Hopefully with my network they can know if their champions are good representations of the sentiments towards their business model.

I’m hoping to be better soon, but since I’ve gotten sick 3 times this year already, I am having a hard time keeping up with everything. Plus, now that I am onboarded, I am back to 2am meetings every week. I think once the last of the submissions are sent it, there will be a lot less stress and hopefully a lot more sleep on my end!!