Week 12: Final Presentation, Reflection, and Final Goodbyes

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! This week, I was able to fully present my research and my findings in the Senior Project Presentation, and I received a lot of very insightful questions! 

Since this will be my final blog post for this project, I’d like to do some reflecting and also acknowledge my advisors and others who supported me.

Reflection

One of the biggest things I learned from this project was how difficult it is to measure something as complex as online behavior. At the beginning, I thought echo chambers were mainly about people agreeing with each other, but throughout the project I realized that network structure, and sentiment are also just as important. This project helped me better understand how social media platforms can shape the way people interact with media and viewpoints online.

I also learned a lot about the challenges of working with real-world data. Cleaning datasets, organizing communities, and deciding how to weigh different metrics was much more difficult than I thought. There were many times where I had to rethink my methodology, adjust my weighting system, or test whether my results were actually meaningful through methods like sensitivity analysis and null models. 

Another important takeaway was learning how to communicate technical ideas clearly. Since my project involved complicated ideas like network analysis and sentiment analysis, I had to practice explaining complex concepts in a simpler way, especially during presentations and discussions.

Overall, this project showed me how mathematics and programming can be used to study real societal problems, while I also learned more about how nuanced online communities and human behavior can be. Throughout my project, I had to try several different ways to show these complexities quantitatively. In the end, I grew from each challenge I faced, and I think the resilience that came with facing each challenge will help me in the future. 

Acknowledgements

I would like to start by thanking my faculty mentor Mrs. Bhattacharya. Each weekly meeting with her was very insightful, and she helped me through the issues I faced with this project like figuring out ways to compare communities that were fundamentally different. Her support was extremely helpful in keeping me on track and helping me work towards my final goal. 

I would also like to thank my external mentor Dr. Phil Mui. In the past, I have studied many different kinds of social issues, and he was extremely helpful as I worked to find ways I could model qualitative data into something I could analyze using numbers and graphs.

I would also like to thank my family for their consistent support. More than just through the finances, they helped me with learning new ways I could improve my project. I remember discussing similarity metrics with my parents just a few weeks ago as I wanted to figure out how I would calculate similarity scores between comments.

Finally, I would like to thank all of you, the readers that have shown your support through comments or just by reading my blogs. If you have any questions about this project, please don’t hesitate to reach out to harish.nskumar@gmail.com

In case you had missed my final presentation, you can view it here:  Link

Feel free to take a look at my slides here: Link

Once again, thank you all very much for your support!

Signing off for the last time,

Harish