#data fun

26th Oct - Day 24 of the @gradblrchallenge

Not a bad day at all. Graded nine (9) papers, wow. Six more to go tomorrow and then I’m done with 57 of them in total. Then I went home and had an actual, warm, homecooked meal, courtesy of my flatmate who is an angel and far too indulgent of my overworked self. Afterwards, I fixed the mistake in my data analysis I noticed yesterday evening and recalculated all necessary information. Took me only about two hours to do, so I feel like Queen of R right now. Still have some graphics to do, but that’s okay. I’m glad I noticed and decided to actually fix it. Depending on how long the grading takes tomorrow, I might go to a coffee shop afterwards and do it then, or on Friday.

22th Oct - Day 20 of the @gradblrchallenge

Day 20, wow to that! I didn’t plan on leaving the couch today, but seeing as I had to retrieve my charger I kind of had to. So since I was back at the coffee shop anyway, I had a giant cup of coffee and a muffin for breakfast and worked on my graphs some more. And then I went back home and alternated between watching Parks & Rec and making more graphics. I got eleven out of twelve done today, so they ended up being fairly quick to make. I actually wish I could show you some, because I think they’re pretty neat, but it might be a bad idea to circulate things from my thesis on the internet before it’s graded and - potentially - published. So I’ll make do with a photo of my screen. ;)

19th Oct - Day 17 of the @gradblrchallenge

No photo today, because while I did get quite a bit of work done, it was on the couch in my pjs and nobody wants to see that. Anyway, I finally got into data analysis proper and man, let me tell you, it is going well. I’d kind of had the impression already that there weren’t going to be that many road blocks once I got to this point. And it seems blessedly true. I’ve got about two thirds of the numbers I need already. The only major difficulty I think is going to be the plots, as I mentioned yesterday. I’ll try to talk to my colleague about that sometime next week and see if he has any thoughts on the matter.

15th Oct - Day 13 of the @gradblrchallenge 

Today marks exactly two months to go until thesis deadline. I think I’m doing fairly well. Started the day off slow and slept in, to finally get enough sleep after the insomnia issues of the past week. Think I’ll sleep okay, tonight, too; I’m not feeling so vibrate-y anymore.

Then I got to work on my data analysis again. Most of the day was spent troubleshooting yesterday‘s script, tbh. But I now have all the pre-processing done and tested and all the networks as I’ll need them. Will start on the subgroup analyses tomorrow. This evening, I made some drafts for tables in Word, so I can start inserting the relevant information as I go along tomorrow. I also played with the plot options in R igraph a bit, but I’m not too happy with them, to be honest. The graphs igraph creates are really crowded and not very legible. I’d like something that arranges nodes according to community membership, but as far as I can tell there’s not an easy option for that. More research required on that front.

This is really short and boring today, but. Wrestled R all afternoon. It looks like the things I assumed were going to be tricky are actually fairly straight forward. Meanwhile things that should be super easy, such as dichotomizing a network matrix at different threshold values, are making me want to tear each hair on my head out individually, so that’s fun. Managed to not throw my computer out of the window and I think I mostly know what to do now, although I was too braindead by the end to actually try it.