Here I have

The post tracking back my progress

From Now

All the way back to

Week 5…

What have I done…

I found it just super hard for me to keep this consistently as a weekly report as I realized I would sometimes overthink about what I should write down which slows down the posting and makes me procrastinate eventually. Another issue of mine is that I found it hard to balance study, work and other personal stuff, I thought I could handle it well at the beginning of the semester, but it turns out there are always more tasks and challenges coming either from the study, work or living. I do gain a valuable experience from the program though. Here is  roughly the progression through each week from week 5:

Week 5:

• This week was mainly just about the intensive days for ‘Coloniality of Data’, but I got a fever which also last for a long time afterwards.
• I also started coursework for ‘Text Mining for Society’, And ‘Postdigital Society’.
  • The coursework in text mining is actually fun and I quite enjoyed it. I chose the dataset from Twitter which has more freedom for text acquisition and might have more interesting insights. Although the result didn’t reach my expectation, I do enjoy this experience and found it very useful.
  • Coursework for postdigital society is even freer, either in format or content. The topic I chose is about cryptocurrency as this has been a topic I am always interested in.

Week 6:

• Still recovering from the fever, while working on the coursework for ‘Text Mining for Society’ and ‘Postdigital Society’
• Continue working on coursework for ‘Exclusion and Inequality’.
  • I decided to focus on the concepts of ‘Surveillance and Policy’. Specifically about how inequality is shown in policing, surveillance and privacy.

Week 7:

• Finishing the coursework for ‘Exclusion and Inequality’.
• Went on a trip to London for personal staff and attended the group meeting for the ‘Coloniality of Data’ group assignment.

Week 8 – 9:

• Back from London, prepare for the artefact for the ‘Coloniality of data’ within my group. We decided to create an album in which we select photos with ‘strong’ backgrounds and then generate datafications of those photos to see what is lost during this procedure.
• Prepare for the group presentation for ‘Interdisciplinary Future’. The three key words for our group were:  Pupils, Schools and Microchip. Originally, we thought of making something like the ‘Apple conference’ as we want our proposed product to have the same or even more functions that mobile phones have nowadays, but we don’t have the skill and time to actually make one. We did make something similar for the presentation and I found it went quite well.

Week 10:

• Prepare for the presentation showing the progression of the group project from ‘Insights through data’. As we originally decided to work on the dataset of world voter turnout, but we found that the original dataset is too small for analysis and might need further columns imported. So we decided to choose a dataset from WHO about world life expectancy.

Week 11:

• I have joined the online exchange activity session for ‘Insights Through Data’ with students from the University of Florida who are taking a course named “Statistical Analysis for Managerial Decisions”. The session is mainly to handle a data analysis task within groups divided in the session. There were only 3-4 students from UoE so there is only one of us in each group. Students in my group were very enthusiastic and active in the task. Not like the python we used in our class, they used R studio for data analysis and they were very kind to me to show all the details in R studio and answer all of my questions about the program. I showed them the procedure I learned in a python way in the end as well.  It is very nice to know all those students from the University of Florida, and I really enjoyed this exchange session.
• Continue working on the group project for ‘Insights through Data’. We found that the quality of the dataset is very low as there is a lot of missing and error data, so we need to focus a lot on the data cleaning section.

Week 12:

• Prepare for the culminating conversation of ‘Coloniality of Data’.
  • Personally, I felt relatively behind in this course but thanks to my teammates who kindly answer my questions for coursework and also other general questions from this course and thanks to my team for creating such a nice album.
• Continue working on the group project for ‘Insight through data’. Still adjusting the data cleaning section following the suggestion from Dr Serveh. And start the data modelling by using regression and the neural network.

Week 13:

• Finishing the group project of ‘Insight through data’. I am very happy about our work, I am just worried that we have done too much for the coursework. I really enjoyed this group work, and thanks to everyone in our group.

That is roughly my weekly progression for the first semester.

For the Project…

From the original project and partner list, I found that I am most interested in the project with Smart Data Foundry and 3Finery. I found myself more passionate about the technical side of the course like programming and analysing which was probably based on my previous study of informatics and math. I do find sociology interesting and meaningful, and those courses guided me with a brand new perspective of thinking. I think studying sociology provides me with heuristic and critical thinking not only in coding projects and statistical analysis but also in reflection and thinking on the latest global news and information, and allows me to dig deeper into the causes and influences of those events. But again back to the project of the program, I still want to choose something I am familiar with since I aim to start a career or further study within the field of data and computer science. I have two projects from the list from DIS that I would like to participate in:

• Evaluating Soft Outcomes for Data-Based Decision Making
• Analysis of Existing Public Sector Benchmarking Data
• Social Media Data Gathering and Identifying Gaps

There is also one partner that I have a strong intention to work with:

• The Smart Data Foundry

I would need to do more research on those projects and partners during the winter break. Hopefully, I could make my final decision and discuss it with my supervisor the next semester.

There are lots of things that I need to improve for my blogs. Hopefully, I can fix this and update more blogs in the second semester.

Thank you very much for reading! See you in SEM2!

The Final Aggregated Post for SEM1 / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0