It’s been a while…

But I made it here, after all the readings and other preparations for the intensive days. The program so far is fun. Loads of discussions and presentations in the class, which is good I think to gather and present more ideas among people. And it did help me to think a lot and gain a lot.

Here is the progress for my program from week 2 to week 4

Week 2:

• All courses are set up on Learn now. Glad that I seem to have the last slot for Text Mining for Social Research.
• Attended Insights Through Data seminar, and everything is clear so far.
• The rest of the week is basically just about the readings for the intensive days of ‘Exclusion and Inequality’ in week 3.

Week 3:

• Had my first intensive days, ‘Exclusion and Inequality. The section was really interactive.
• Go on to prepare for the intensive days of ‘Text Mining for Social Research and ‘Postdigital Society’.

Before this, I actually rarely think about inequalities. I guess just like most people, I just know the existence of inequality, and sometimes get disappointed and a bit angry about something unfair that happened on the news. And I just know this inequality is bad for individuals and society, and we should reduce this phenomenon.

After those two days, I read and heard the history of inequality, the purpose we study inequality and some depressing facts about inequality in different fields. But now, people have started to care about inequality and want to do something to reduce it. Yet I still have negative thoughts about this, since it is just human nature to have prejudice against other people. So I think eventually, inequality cannot be eliminated. What’s more, I think it might be one essential element for social development in some way.

• Attend the Thematic discussion for ‘Coloniality of Data’

Week 4:

• Intensive days for ‘Text Mining for Social Research’

The course is very interesting since I actually haven’t done any social related program through my undergraduate. The assignment is also free to use any method of analysis social data.

• Session for ‘Insights through data’
• Intensive days for ‘Postdigital Society’

Loads of discussion in these two days though I am still a bit lost about the postdigital analysis.

Other thoughts:

It about time to think about the topic for the projects of all the course I have. For ‘Text mining for social research’ and ‘Insights through data’, topic choosing is relatively easy since it more about the dataset and analysis.

‘Exclusion and Inequality’: I am really interested in my topic during intensive days about ‘Surveilliance and Policing’, so I want to read and think further about surveillance and privacy.

‘Postdigital Society’: I only have a general direction for the assignment about  Money in ‘Postdigital Society’, I still need to think more specific about the topic.

For the initial thought of final project, I found some very interesting project through the list, but they all might be very popular:

• Evaluating Soft Outcomes for Data-Based Decision Making

• Develop Online Version of Benchmarking Tool

Also, I found some partner company very related to my study and aim of the course:

• Smart Data Foundry
• 3Finery

I am really interested by the project of AR museum from 3Finery, but I think the project is more focus on the narrative side.

So, it is just some review and thinking through week 2 to week 4.

What next?

Still need to prepare for the intensive days for ‘Coloniality of data’ for next week. At the meantime, assignments are sort of all released, and I need to start structure and initiate some ideas for either report or presentation for some course, as well as discuss with teammate for the group project.

Also, I need to think further about the final project. i.e. What I want to do with the partner company? Which aspect do I want to focus on? The specific reason why I want to choose the project and some initial structure for the project (project purpose and required document for the project). I really think about those questions before the supervision meeting next week.

That is my reflection and some idea for the projects in my program. There are still lots need to do next week. Hopefully this time, I could update the blogs as I expected from the beginning of the program.

(PS. How did you guys find that little emoji put in the blog….)

Second Blog: From week 2 to week 4 / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0