Updates

[c1araaa]

UPDATE #1: For our final project, we will not be building upon our mid-semester project, but instead looking at the social impacts of the pandemic specifically on Asian- and Black-American populations. Through our mid semester project we realized that the current available data surrounding vaccinations isn't all that great; however, we still wanted to focus on COVID and the sociopolitical effects of the pandemic which have a multitude of public health implications. Additionally, this past year has brought the prevalence of anti-Black and anti-Asian hate crimes and violence to the forefront of many American minds. This issue is not just a social one but greatly impacts health, and as of early April, the CDC has declared racism as a threat to public health.

By analyzing both demographic, health, and social data (such as social media metrics), our group aims to explore how the past pandemic year has impacted both the mental and physical health of our chosen population. Our guiding questions are:

1. How has the pandemic impacted access to healthcare/social services?
2. How has the pandemic impacted mental health?
3. Have popular social movements such as #StopAsianHate or #BlackLivesMatter had an impact on health outcomes?

From our mid-semester experience, we understand that we will not be able to address all of these questions from one dataset/source. We are currently looking at utilizing Pew Research survey data, CDC data, Twitter data (using TwitteR), Google trends data, and additional data from Data World. With the data we collect we hope to create an interactive leaflet spatial visualization, both bar and histogram visualizations, and word clouds using the text data collected.

Schedule for our group's progress

• 05/03 (Mon): group meeting, finalize datasets
• 05/04 (Tue): UPDATE 2 due!
• 05/05 (Wed): group meeting, complete exploratory data analysis, set up GitHub Pages (motivations, research questions, info about the dataset)
• 05/06 (Thu): ask Kat questions in class
• 05/10 (Mon): group meeting, complete data analysis, present our results to each other
• 05/11 (Tue): UPDATE 3 due!
• 05/12 (Wed): group meeting, put together GitHub Pages (make it look pretty! no errors in code!)
• 05/13 (Thu): PRESENTATION DAY! (live)
• 05/19 (Wed): FINAL BLOG POST and REFLECTION II due!

[katcorr]

@c1araaa @Bkwon23 @lewisayodele17

This sounds like a interesting and important new direction for the final project, and I look forward to your blog post!

Update 1: 10/10

[c1araaa]

UPDATE #2: We are hoping to dedicate more serious time to this project in the coming days. Our group members were all swamped with other classes last week (i.e., Clara had thesis deadline and thesis defense, and Ayo and Brandon had their organic chemistry exam). Our schedules are much more free starting today and onwards and are hoping to make substantial progress!

We decided on our datasets (in the data file) and are planning to start wrangling and cleaning up the datasets. We are meeting as a group on Thursday to outline our blog post and make a detailed plan about how were are going to proceed with putting the blog post together.

[katcorr]

@c1araaa @lewisayodele17 @Bkwon23

Congrats on being done with your thesis defense, Clara, and your organic chemistry exams, Ayo and Brandon! Despite not being able to dedicate as much time as you may have liked last week to the data wrangling, it sounds like you have a good plan going forward.

Update 2: 5/5

[c1araaa]

UPDATE #3: We achieved most of the work that we wanted to! We are slightly behind as we aimed to finish our blog post by our presentation date, even though we have more time afterward to complete it. We are coming to be more realistic with our goals and decided to try our best to make an as complete blog post by our presentation date on Thursday but we can finalize and perfect our blog post after presenting and before the official deadline.

• Clara finally got her Twitter API approved and started to make progress with text/sentimental analysis. Acquiring the Twitter API was a more involved process than she thought it would be (there's an application with 5 questions, and follow-up questions afterward once they started to read the initial application, and then finally a confirmation!)
• Brandon is working on his Shiny app built off the mental health dataset.
• Ayo is working on her Shiny app (leaflets) built off a dataset that contains information about the Black/Asian communities in the US.

We planned for a group meeting tomorrow, May 12th at 8-10 pm EST in hopes to come together and finalize everything and prepare for our presentation on Thursday!

[katcorr]

@c1araaa @lewisayodele17 @Bkwon23

sounds good!

Update 3: 5/5