Month: April 2025

My presentation for my CIS capstone happened today and I’m finally free. It’s time for me to lock in and finish writing this report. While I didn’t get around to rewriting my first report, I’m looking forward to putting the advice I received on it into action for report number 2. The main one I want to focus on is ensuring that any pictures or figured I include relevant to the paper and useful to furthering the understanding of readers. I have a tendency of just including pictures in each section because they feel barren too me, but that’s not very effective when trying to persuade readers.

Now that I have a subset of the datasets for each group, I’ve been running statics for them like type of protest (violent, non-violent, etc) or size of the protest. I’m in the process of figuring out what I want the overall focus of my report to be and what data I can use to accomplish that.

The main idea I have right now is seeing if I can relate the reasoning for protests to geographical location, like do protests revolving around education happen in states with a higher education standard such as Mass.

I’ve decided how to group the different data points based on the actor’s present in the protest and now need to divide the datasets. Normally I’d do this through fancy indexing, but the actor columns I’m using for grouping contain string data which doesn’t interact nicely with fancy indexing. Due to this, I’ll need to run through the datasets manually with loops looking for substrings within each actor entry. This will take some time but ultimately lead to multiple curated data frames for analysis.

It seems like a sentiment analysis on the notes for each event is a dead end. While it’s technically possible, the notes lack many words that carry strong positive or negative connotations. Upon further inspection, the notes column doesn’t actually contain articles about the protests, but rather facts about it organized into a paragraph.

Because of this I’ve decided to switch my focus over to grouping the types of people and organizations associated with protests. Once I have this, there are many different relationships I can look into such as who participates in the most violent protests or which group amasses the largest number of total protesters.