I am combining my 1st and 2nd blog posts as I did not submit the first one yet. I had been relying on the Google Classroom and hadn’t realized that the assignments weren’t being posted there.
What are your research question(s)? What data are you interested in?
In some ways, this is a very difficult question to answer at the beginning of the semester. For me, Text as Data is a brand new research tool, and I as such, I don’t feel like I have a good sense about what the kinds of questions we can answer using it are.
That being said, one area I’m really interested in is the online world of fandom and interaction via social media, both peer-to-peer interaction and connection (either direct communication or in an on-line fandom space) as well as the type of one-way, parasocial relationships that individuals form with celebrities (or at least, with their social media accounts).
Taylor Swift is an example of a celebrity who is very engaged active on social media, and who has a large and engaged fandom. She has over 2 million followers on Instagram and over 90 million followers on Twitter. In 2018, Taylor Swift broke her silence on politics and made an Instagram post supporting the Democratic candidates in TN for the midterm elections, and encouraging her followers to register to vote. This post now has over 2 million likes. In the days after her post (which linked to vote.org), popular media claimed that voter registration had spiked after her post. While a direct causal claim would be difficult to substantiate, it seems to me it would be interesting to look at the social media posts of her followers before and after her Instagram post to get a sense if there was a reaction to her statement.
For example, looking at tweets from her followers right before and right after the post, and comparing hastags used might offer some insight into her fandom and how they reacted to this post. Another source of information might be such a space as r/TaylorSwift.
It’s my sense that a reddit forum may feel more private than a space like Twitter or Instagram, and might yield different results. I’m not entirely sure what the types of analyses you might run would be, but I assume as the course progresses, we’ll learn more about that.
For your second blog post, consider the following points. You can write about all of them, or select one question, depending on where you’re now.
At this point, I’m feeling somewhat frustrated with my progress in this course. I personally find that the best way for me to learn coding is by working on projects. I find it very difficult to simply read other people’s code to learn how to do something, I’m much more hands-on in my learning style. In addition, I have literally no Python experience, and no coursework in this program to date has required Python, so I am concerned about getting to a place where I can use the data and tools that are being presented.
I’m really struggling with how best to make use of the tutorials. I’ve been trying to copy code over to R, but I’m finding that I’m having a tremendous amount of trouble using the SelectorGadget. I’ve used the Inspect Code method and compared what I’ve found to the provided tutorial code, which doesn’t work on my R Studio set up. Even the CSS selector game is difficult, as I’m getting very stuck on levels and have no way of knowing what it is that I’m doing wrong. I’m not sure if there is a different way for me to engage with the technical aspects of the course, but I’d be very interested in figuring it out because at this point, I’m starting to feel like I’m very behind and the materials we have are just not really working for me.
At this point, I think my next step is to play around with scraping Twitter and/or Reddit and seeing if just trying to work through the data acquisition would help me to better integrate the techniques in the tutorials. I am very much an applied, hands-on learner!
I think I also need to seek out more examples of what kinds of research projects are appropriate for text as data, as I don’t have a great sense of what kinds of questions I might be able to answer with this approach.
I am planning on spending this next week getting caught up in this class and getting my reserach project more clearly defined, which I think will really help me to better focus my attentions on the technical work.