Showcasing Interdisciplinary Innovation - Students Present Final Projects
The final lab weeks provided students a chance to share an overview of their personal research projects. This highlighted the culmination of months of dedicated work and celebrated our lab’s innovative spirit and collaborative efforts.
Celina Krantz ‘24 presented their research proposal, “Narrating the Future of Psychology,” exploring the discipline’s future through presidential addresses and their historical visions. The foundations of Celina’s research included a literature review and four selected addresses for close reading, situating the historical context of when they were delivered. Their insights into presidential addresses and their historical visions of the future may help us understand the success of the APA.
Lab manager Jen Thornquest ‘24 presented “How to Build a Lab.” She covered measuring lab activities, setting goals, and what a multidisciplinary lab offers students. Jen emphasized three main activities at work in the mhc metrics lab: (1) personal research projects for each member, (2) shared contribution to building the corpus of presidential addresses for future research, and (3) mixed expertise team experiences.
Data Science students Fiona Dowell ‘24 and Hema Motaini ‘26 each presented their work on the State of the Union “Dummy Corpus.” Fiona used R for topic modeling on the State of the Union addresses, discussing technical issues with necessary packages. Hema used Python for the same corpus, focusing on KMeans and hierarchical clustering.
Hanh Minh Pham ‘26, Mihn Robin Tran ‘25, and Sanskriti Giri ‘26 each presented their projects related to the data cleaning process for the address corpus. Hanh explained data-cleaning the economics presidential addresses, beginning with a TL;DR for non-technical students unfamiliar with the process. Her clear explanations made the presentation accessible and informative for all, and she provided clear documentation throughout, highlighting the process of combining lines in the data set. Sanskriti discussed her process for cleaning the political science presidential addresses. She addressed challenges like removing inconsistencies (headers and footers) in the text, converting all text to lowercase, and ensuring correct file order. Her presentation underscored the importance of translating technical information to fellow team members. Robin focused on data cleaning the psychology domain speeches. Her accomplishments include developing a text summarization method and experimenting with NLTK, Spacy, and Python. She also tackled vocabulary checks, paragraph preservation, and header-footer removal.
Sociology major Coco Jiang ‘25 presented her proposal, “Formalizing Data as a Style of Speech: The Use of Numbers, Charts, and Empirical Exhibits as Storytelling Tools in ASA Presidential Addresses.” She examined how ASA presidents use data as storytellers and integral parts of their narratives.
These final presentations showcased the lab’s interdisciplinary approach. Each presentation offered a unique glimpse into the intersection of sociology, data science, and our mixed-method team approach to research.
