Capstone Blog Post 10

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.

As of last week most of these tasks were either close to finished or were finished. The visualizations were on their third iteration. Over the past week the website styling was applied to each graph (both in font and color) and any graph with more than one color was changed to use a color-blind friendly scheme. Confidence Scores were renamed to Inaccuracy Score to be more sensible. The multiple linear regression model was reviewed and finalized making it ready to be inserted into the final document.

The capstone summary document was also fairly close to complete. Chapters 4 & 5 were written, and then edited along with all other chapters. The whole summary document was converted from a Microsoft Word document to a LibreOffice Writer document. Additionally, I switched over to a Linux based operating system, I had to rename many files Clery Act files to being properly capitalized as I edited some of the code cleaning up formatting mistakes. The summary document has now been sent for review leaving the final steps (a poster and pre-recorded video presentation) to be completed before the end of the semester.

Overall this project completed a lot of work for two semesters. I was able to keep on schedule throughout the whole semester with that I had planned. Due to the pandemic, I was unable to reach any stretch goals which is disappointing. This work is interesting enough where I might continue working on this project through graduation onward. Many of the stretch goals involved with this project included making the information more accessible with a potential graphical user interface to complement the data gathering and preprocessing steps. It would even be interesting to implement an application that could make visualizations from this particular dataset dynamically. Once these tools are implemented, it would be nice to also start reaching out to other colleges and hear the stories of other students who have dealt with their Title IX systems.

Judging by all the challenges I have personally faced to get to this point, it is very apparent that most students will not be able to use this data the way it was intended to be used. From gathering so many different data files to coding fairly complex solutions there is a lot to stop a student from doing the research they need to do in order to become an informed citizen. My hope is that continued work on this project could give a lot of students the head start they need to start implementing change at their own institutions and raise awareness of sexual violence on their individual campuses. That is, whenever we are able to get back onto campus.