On Thursday, April 23, 2020, the Internet Governance Lab, in support of the 2020 International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) International Girls in ICT Day (#GirlsInICT), organized a globally distributed session on “Women Who Code: Big Data Analytics and Text Mining in R and RStudio”.
Click here or on the image below to watch a recording of the session.
Organized by Internet Governance Lab Faculty Director Dr. Derrick L. Cogburn, Professor of Information Technology and Analytics and International Communication in the Kogod School of Business and School of International Service at American University, and Executive Director of the AU Institute on Disability and Public Policy, the discussion focused on the growing importance of big data analytics broadly speaking, and text analytics in particular while demonstrating the power of coding in the open source data analytics language R, programming the free RStudio Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and highlighted a range of packages that substantially extend the capabilities of R.
Following a practical overview of how to install and write code in R and RStudio, the session moved to five presentations from five female scholars, demonstrating the analytic and descriptive power of the programming language for research on a wide range of topics and disciplines. The lineup included:
Ms. Yujia Wan
IDPP Research Associate, Masters of International Affairs, School of International Service
Topic: “What’s Behind the Great Firewall? Differences between Baidu and Google in Searching Results”
Ms. Sana Naz
IDPP Research Associate, MS Analytics, Department of Information Technology and Analytics, Kogod School of Business
Topic: “Data Analytics and Predictive Modeling in R”
Ms. Dana Meyers
Masters of International Affairs, School of International Service
Topic: ”Key Issues in 2020 US Presidential Campaigns: Comparing Professed Themes to Actual Messaging on Twitter”
Ms. Sofia Schmidt
Masters of U.S. Foreign Policy & National Security, School of International Service
Topic: “Identifying Push Factors in Northern Triangle Migrant Interviews”
Ms. Chelsea L. Horne
Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Literature at American University; Doctoral Program, School of Communication; Faculty Fellow, Internet Governance Lab
Topic: “Governing Truth: An Analysis of “Post-Truth” Discussions of “Fake News” at IGF”