“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein

Hi everyone,

how are you all?  I know we are certainly getting into the part of the semester were we have a few assingments to chew through and personally my intensive courses and their assignment seem to overlap a lot, but following Einsteib’s words we can’t just give up, but life goes on and every little task we tick off our busy to do lists helps us to “keep the balance” – anyone else like this quote or just me since I love Einsteins work? 🙂

Anyway, let’s more on to this weeks reflection on the final project and the thought-progress I have made. Over the last couple of weeks I have certainly learned a lot of new things, partcipated in new electives, learned more about Phyton, tried to play in an orchestra again (maybe put on hold due to the quantitiy of assignments for now), read some literature in foreign languages and most important of all had A LOT of conversations with A LOT of different people. Knowing myself what helps me most in refining a project idea are 2 things

• Written lists and visualisations
• Conversation in which I can vocalise the ideas I have

I am super grateful that I got to speak to a bunch of different people with various backgrounds and hear their insights and thought on my degree and project ideas as well as finding out how it does (not) relate to their work. I chatted to a bunch of people from uni (with various backgrounds) some friends outside of uni (with physics, technical, sales and HR backgrounds) as well as my partner’s relatives who come from various backgrounds and one has their own marketing company and had a lot of GREAT insight into how my degree is relevant to their work and clients. So long story short I came to realise a few things

1. Only being really “fascinated” by something or thinking it would be “really cool” isn’t enough – I need to ask myself again and again how this translates int what I want to do afterwards
2. What skills am I wanting to use in a professional setting and how can this project be a “testimony” of such skills?
3. Thinking outside the box & using the freedom this project gives does not mean I need to abandon what has worked (and I have enjoyed) in the past

So summa sumarum, I realised that I should certainly have a dissertation component in my final project since I would love to pursue a PhD after this degree and can invision a research based job for instance in a Think Tank. For applying to PhDs I have to write a proposal anyway – this could be a great chance to start reading and organising my ideas for a dissertation topic. However, I would love (and here A BIG THANK YOU to a few of you who have given me amazing resources and links) to combine it with some kind of data-visualisation art of my results.

So I think coming from my initial BIG mindmap I have already cut a lot of the ideas down and feel like this project is currently on a managable and feasible scale. However, the details of topic and how I want to transalte my findings into art still needs refining. With regards to the art I am thinking of layering photography with amazing data visualisation 🙂 So while I feel ready to start thinking of a proposal, I am a little stuck on what methods to use. With regards to the art I think I will need to revisit this once I have a more concrete idea of the kind of data collection I want to do. Overall, I would like to look at something along the lines of “Data-drive approachen to solving inequalities in Science Communication”. However, I also LOVED the neuroscience approach in my module neuropolitics and it would be INCREDIBLE to be able to do something with e.g. eye tracking.

Methods?

Methods has been something I have struggled with since I first started thinking about this project since I am only used to qualitative analysis. For instance, in my undergraduate dissertation I did interviews and Critical Discourse Analysis. However, I would really like to use the new skills I have gained and implement quantitative methods. However, I am unsure how I should collect data accordingly. Or would it be possible to combine insights from various datasets that are available online? This is certainly something I need to ponder over more. I think going forward I will read a few similar studies and see what methods they used.

I would love to hear your input and thoughts on my first project ideas 🙂 Thanks x

#lilac

Week 7 – Einstein inspiration / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0