Capstone Stories

As another week passes by the world continues to change in significant ways that unfortunately impact this capstone. With Champlain College’s announcement that students will not return to campus, in addition to stricter stay-at-home orders for Vermont, the part of this capstone that hoped to communicate with Champlain College has extinguished. It is no longer a viable option to talk with staff in a timely manner while finishing visualizations and writing. As of this moment, the final form of this capstone will be visualizations of the Clery Act data, inaccuracy scores, and a multiple linear regression model.

Within the past month a lot has happened both in the world and in this capstone. No research is in complete isolation of the environment around it, thus the recent events around the world have also had a significant impact on how the rest of this capstone will progress. While I find that I did not make as much progress as I previously hoped to accomplish, considering the current circumstances of the COVID-19 outbreak I would consider my current work satisfactory.

Over the past two weeks this capstone has developed new pathways to expressing information about the Clery Act data that were originally not planned. The main form of these pathways were changes to the initial data exploration visualizations to convey more meaning and a new statistic to explain how confident the researchers are that a college is reporting the correct numbers. While these new ideas sprung to life in a capstone check-in meeting, other parts of this project have been temporarily delayed. Chapters 3 and 4 will make more progress in the coming weeks now that a large part of the project changed.

The Data Analytics capstone is supposed to showcase the student’s budding talents that have developed over the past four years. While most of these talents are supposed to be data science related, my skillset has always been broader rather than narrow. The past month has reflected where my skillset starts to deviate from Champlain College’s education. The biggest feat of the last month’s work has been the new website I helped engineer.

Within the past month I have had the opportunity to sit down and work on my capstone project uninterrupted. The goal as of last semester was to finish the data cleaning/gathering portion of this project and dive deep into validating my results. Two weeks into the break, I finally finished gathering all the data from approximately 200 files and organized it into one file through Python code alone. My previous attempt at using Microsoft Excel failed as I was trying to run too many formulas on one spreadsheet. This second attempt instead modified the code I had taken and concatenated the files in such a way that I could add the year dynamically. This means I now have one CSV file that contains all crimes from 2009 to 2017. On top of organizing, I was also able to simplify the 600 columns of information into approximately 80 columns. Many crimes such as liquor were classified not only as a liquor crime, but also by location and type. (It could be an on-campus crime or off campus or hate or public property crime.) I made the executive decision to combine all these different classifications to make the data more human readable. This combination did make the assumption that if a college did not report any statistics, they had no crimes reported. There is logic behind why I made this decision. In a given report, we only pulled data for that year. (A 2009 report includes 2007 and 2008 statistics, but we only took 2009.) I assume if a college was receiving federal funding, then they would have to report statistics for that year. This was not always the case. In fact, many colleges just did not have anything for the year of the report. I do not know why this data is missing, but I might be able to find out more by contacting the Clery Center which could provide an explanation. Until I receive a response, I am stuck making this assumption.

Before Thanksgiving break, I had the opportunity to present my initial prototype. Since this capstone project is different from a stereotypical Computer Science project, there was no program that showcased my process. My initial prototype reflected the Data Science process, and much less a reflection of a typical programming project. Unfortunately, I did not have any work that easily showcased all my efforts, so I had to make a presentation of all the different tasks I have set out to do.

With only four weeks until the end of the semester, we are reaching the final leg of preparation for this capstone project. Before that leg ends, we still have a lot of work to do. One constant main concern for this project is getting our research approved by Champlain College’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). The paperwork we must fill out is quite extensive and will force our group to accelerate the Professional Writing side of this capstone that does not start until next semester. With the discordance in time frames, it is becoming increasingly harder to get the required work of our first semester work done while adding more work of the upcoming semester. Our hope it that both me and my partner’s schedules will line up within the next week so we can have a solid chunk of time to decide on the future of this capstone’s parameters surrounding interviews and call for submissions. Since the IRB is not required to approve projects in a specific time frame, this approval process could be a big burden if we do not get it approved before next semester.

When I first dove into this project I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had a general outline of who I wanted to work with and how we would collaborate, but I didn’t have a clear sense of what the final product would be. As we have had time to do research and develop our idea, we are starting to hone in on one idea in particular: an anthology. Making a collection of stories through calls for submissions, interviews, and data may give the impact that can help address the rough outline of Chapter 1 in the capstone document. Having this anthology readily available to the public, and more importantly students and staff, might help not only give the researchers gain a more holistic understanding of the impact of sexual violence at Champlain College, but it can help readers as well. At this point, it might be good to amend Chapter 1’s purpose statement to include educating the general public.

As mentioned in my previous post, the nature of my capstone is very different to other capstones in my division. Since the very nature of this capstone pertains around sexual violence, and the process will be fluid, much of my research will focus on sexual violence and not to the data analysis process. At this point I have sources ranging from academic reports to documentaries. I’ve captured both primary sources as well as secondary sources. My research is also spanning the recent history of how sexual violence has been handled in the United States and internationally. Recently I watched an informative documentary called The Hunting Ground. Not only did a get a fantastic view of how other colleges are handling sexual violence cases on campus, but I also got a perspective of numerous students around the country and what students are doing to change the current culture in the United States. I also learned about how to report a Title IX violation at a college to launch an investigation. Sources in this documentary conveniently listed with facts, which makes it very easy to find trails of research that I can investigate further.

For senior year capstone, I will be teaming up with Professional Writer Rose Marshall to research Sexual Violence on college campuses, specifically looking at Champlain College. For this capstone project, we will be using both data (analyzed by myself) as well a human stories (gathered by Rose), to give a more holistic understanding of the current situation on Champlain College’s campus.