#cogpsycho100

Q: Who are you?

My name is Byron, I’m a 20 year old rising senior at Swarthmore College (near Philadelphia). I go by he/him pronouns. I am a black/Jamaican-American male. Grew up in Connecticut. I’m doing a special major in Educational Studies & Computer Science, alongside a minor in Psychology. But I’m not actually interested in becoming a teacher or something like that... Instead, I’m a bit more interested in research. So digital humanities, data-mining and modeling, programming for social good by whatever means necessary, etc...

Q: What is this blog?

An academic journal where I’m gonna post reflections and answer questions about the research I’m doing this summer. If I’m not making text posts or orignial content, I’ll try to find things that are relevant.

Q: An academic journal on tumblr?

Yeh. i could’ve made Wordpress site, sure. Tumblr’s just a lot better imo.

Sites like tumblr and facebook provide a “collapsed context” for people to act in. By collapsed context, I just mean... Your “Friends,” your “followers,” and so forth could be anyone ranging from family and irl friends to coworkers, professionals, deep web personnel, etc... All of these different groups of people are literally collapsed into one audience, or one list of usernames and followers (and anons). Especially with the way that tumblr is designed (likes and reblogs are the main way you interact with people), it really puts this idea of collapsed contexts into practice way better than just some wordpress site that is probably going to be pretty dead by the end of the summer.

I don’t really  want to get “famous” or whatever. I just want people to actually be able to engage with what I post. I’m young, there’s still a lot that I don’t know. Just because someone’s doing research, doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with them or should take their words as fact. You should try to take any and every chance you get to “complicate” someone’s work. This doesn’t mean that you do your best to be contrarian and argue against everything they say, but when your experience and knowledge doesn’t quite line up with what a long piece of paper says, that’s a good moment to ask “why” and “what could be different about my experience, perpsective, and positionality in comparison to this researcher that’s making me question this?” In a less formal context like social media, like tumblr I think people can get more honest feedback and “complications.” 

Q: What are you researching this summer?

I’m doing research at George Mason University in Educational Data Science/data-mining. This is a 10 week program and I’m trying to cram in a lot... but my research project’s focus is on how students find role models and support through social media (or, the lack thereof). I’ll be analyzing a very very small portion of data from twitter (<1%), tweets where people used #STEM and #EngineeringProblems. At some point I will probably have to read 1000 tweets... but I’m also going to try some “automatic” and computer programmed forms of data analysis (sentiment analysis and types of language processing techniques).

Since I read a lot of qualitative research, one of the personal questions I really have is can educational data science actually be used to learn about the quality of people’s learning experiences in classrooms, guide curriculum, etc... or am I just creating several big tables of statistics cuz academics and neoliberal business models want some fancy numbers to talk about?

Q: What kind of name is “cogpsycho100?”