Why an Academic Journal on tumblr? Q&A
Q: Who are you?
My name is Byron, Iâm 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. Iâm doing a special major in Educational Studies & Computer Science, alongside a minor in Psychology. But Iâm not actually interested in becoming a teacher or something like that... Instead, Iâm 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 Iâm gonna post reflections and answer questions about the research Iâm doing this summer. If Iâm not making text posts or orignial content, Iâll try to find things that are relevant.
Q: An academic journal on tumblr?
Yeh. i couldâve made Wordpress site, sure. Tumblrâs just a lot better imo.
Sites like tumblr and facebook provide a âcollapsed contextâ for people to act in. By collapsed context, I just mean... Your âFriends,â your âfollowers,â 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 donât really want to get âfamousâ or whatever. I just want people to actually be able to engage with what I post. Iâm young, thereâs still a lot that I donât know. Just because someoneâs doing research, doesnât mean you canât disagree with them or should take their words as fact. You should try to take any and every chance you get to âcomplicateâ someoneâs work. This doesnât mean that you do your best to be contrarian and argue against everything they say, but when your experience and knowledge doesnât quite line up with what a long piece of paper says, thatâs a good moment to ask âwhyâ and âwhat could be different about my experience, perpsective, and positionality in comparison to this researcher thatâs making me question this?â In a less formal context like social media, like tumblr I think people can get more honest feedback and âcomplications.âÂ
Q: What are you researching this summer?
Iâm doing research at George Mason University in Educational Data Science/data-mining. This is a 10 week program and Iâm trying to cram in a lot... but my research projectâs focus is on how students find role models and support through social media (or, the lack thereof). Iâll 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 Iâm also going to try some âautomaticâ 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 peopleâs 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 âcogpsycho100?â
Itâs just a play on âMob Psycho 100.â Iâve been studying cognitive psychology/cognitive science for the past year so...
