Project 1: Changing Communities and Technology
Efforts to study gentrification are notoriously fraught with difficulty, however, and the study of displacement and other forms of harm to original residents presents additional hurdles.
Kirkland, Elizabeth. "What's Race Got to Do With it? Looking for the Racial Dimensions of Gentrification." Western Journal of Black Studies 32.2 (2008).
The first project we worked on was on gentrification.The objective of this study is to explore online communication about gentrification in one localized neighborhood and begin to identify patterns in online conversations as they are related to the change occurring in the communities. Using data mining tools, we sought to figure out how the conversation online was about the topic. We build scrapers for sites such as Yelp, NextDoor, Everyblock, City-data, Reddit, and many others, using Python and Scrapy to do so. We ended up collecting over 10,000 comments in the span of a few weeks, which we then began to thematically code using Atlas TI.
Project 2: Woodlawn Parents Community
School programs and teacher practices to organize family and school connections are "equalizers" to help families who would not become involved on their own.
Epstein, Joyce L., and Susan L. Dauber. "School programs and teacher practices of parent involvement in inner-city elementary and middle schools." The Elementary School Journal (1991): 289-305.).
The second project we worked on was in conjunction with a group from Northwestern. We went into a Chicago neighborhood, Woodlawn, and interviewed parents on their participation in certain school programs with the aim of finding out whether they used certain online tools in their communication with other parents and faculty. We visited the community various times and collected observations on what we observed. Our aim was to build a relationship with the community and later interview several parents involved within the community groups in order to understand how social capital and technology were used by the parents of Woodlawn.
Final Paper
dreu_technical_paper_-_online_conversations_in_changing_neighborhoods.pdf | |
File Size: | 991 kb |
File Type: |