Tag Archives: digital

CAN YOU PROVIDE EXAMPLES OF HOW STUDENTS CAN LEVERAGE DIGITAL METHODS FOR DATA COLLECTION IN CAPSTONE PROJECTS

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Students today have access to a wide variety of digital tools and platforms that can be extremely useful for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data for capstone research projects. Some of the most common digital methods that students use in capstones include online surveys, data scraping, network analysis, geospatial mapping, and sentiment analysis.

Online surveys have been used by students for a long time to collect primary data from a large number of respondents. Tools like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, and Typeform allow students to design professional-looking questionnaires and distribute them via social media, email lists, or websites to quickly gather responses from hundreds or even thousands of people on their research topic. This can provide a large dataset for analysis without the time and resource constraints of interviewing people individually. Students need to consider best practices for survey design, distribution, response rates, and potential nonresponse bias when using this method.

Data scraping is a newer digital method that involves using computer programs or scripts to automatically extract large datasets from the web. Students can write scripts using languages like Python to scrape publicly available data from websites, social media posts, online databases, and other digital sources. For example, a student studying political discourse could scrape thousands of tweets containing certain hashtags or keywords to analyze sentiment and topic trends over time. Scraping Wikipedia pages or company websites can provide more structured data for studying topics across specific domains. This allows analysis of very large datasets not possible through manual entry. Students need scripting knowledge and must ensure any scraped data respects copyright and terms of use.

Network analysis is commonly used in social sciences capstones to map and examine relationships within large datasets. Digital tools allow mapping social networks extracted from sources like Facebook, LinkedIn, or coauthorship databases. Analytics can then quantify the structure of relationships, identify influential actors, and detect communities. For example, a student could map retweet or mention networks on Twitter to understand how information spreads. Visualization and metrics tools within programs like Gephi, NodeXL, and R make complex network analysis more accessible for students. Ethical issues around consent and anonymizing personal networks must be addressed.

Geospatial mapping and analysis is another technique benefiting from digital maps and geographic information systems (GIS). Students can overlay location data from sources like government open data portals, sensor networks and cellular datasets onto digital maps to understand spatial patterns. For instance, a public health student may map disease incidence with environmental factors to detect clusters. Urban planning students frequently use GIS to model and visualize scenarios. Free and open-source GIS software like QGIS lower the barrier for students to engage in sophisticated spatial analysis and visualization.

Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing algorithms to detect subjective opinions in large text corpora like reviews, tweets, or survey responses. Digital tools allow automation of tasks like classifying polarity (positive/negative) or intensity of sentiment at scale. For example, an engineering management student analyzed sentiments in 1000+ customer reviews of a new product to understand drivers of satisfaction. Text analysis techniques provide systematic, data-driven insights into topics that are difficult to measure through surveys alone. Issues around bias in underlying models and representation of diverse voices must be considered.

Digital methods like online surveys, data scraping, network analysis, geospatial mapping and sentiment analysis empower students to collect and analyze far larger and richer datasets than was possible before for capstone research. When combined with strong research questions, rigorous data collection practices, and consideration of ethical issues – these techniques allow exploration of new fronts and help produce impactful work. Access to public open data sources and free or low-cost digital tools have significantly lowered barriers for students to leverage powerful computational social science approaches in their final-year projects.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES THAT TRADITIONAL MEDIA CHANNELS HAVE FACED DUE TO DIGITAL MEDIA

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Traditional media channels such as newspapers, television, radio, and print magazines have faced significant disruption and challenges with the emergence and rise of digital media platforms. Some of the major challenges include:

Declining Advertising Revenue: Advertising has traditionally been the primary source of revenue for most traditional media outlets. With more people accessing news and consuming content online, advertising dollars have steadily shifted towards digital platforms. Giants like Google and Facebook now dominate the online advertising market, capturing over 50% of all new digital ad spending. This has led to steep declines in advertising revenue for newspapers, television channels, and other traditional outlets.

For example, newspaper advertising revenue in the US peaked at $49 billion in 2000 but fell to just $16 billion in 2017. Print magazines have seen even sharper drops, losing around 50% of their revenue to digital competitors over the past decade. This loss of ad money has put severe financial pressure on traditional media business models.

Shift in Consumer Habits: Younger audiences now practically live online, relying on various digital platforms for consuming content, news and staying connected. Traditionally, people would watch scheduled television programs, listen to the radio during commute, or read newspapers daily. Digital media has allowed on-demand access to content anywhere, anytime via mobile devices.

This has changed fundamental consumer habits and eroded the importance of traditional fixed schedules and formats. TV viewership of younger demographics is declining while time spent on various online streaming services is rising exponentially. Print newspaper circulation figures have fallen drastically almost everywhere as people get their news online.

Challenges of Platform Disruption: Digital technologies have enabled entirely new kinds of media platforms like social networks, online video sites, blogs, messaging apps etc. that were never imagined before. Some of these like Facebook and YouTube have become massively popular, disrupting traditional media business models.

Traditional players have found it difficult to establish a strong presence on these new digital platforms or to leverage emerging technologies for content distribution and monetization. It is also challenging for them to replicate their fixed costs across different online formats and platforms. This platform disruption combined with the migration of audiences online, has eroded the competitive advantages of scale previously enjoyed by traditional media organizations.

Rising Content Costs: To survive in the digital age, traditional outlets have invested heavily in building sophisticated digital products, developing new skills like data analytics and improving their websites and apps. This has meant higher infrastructure and operational costs at a time when advertising revenues are declining sharply.

Producing high-quality on-demand digital video and audio content requires huge investments that were not needed earlier for linear broadcast. Traditional media companies also have to pay substantial fees to the dominant online platforms to access audiences and run advertising campaigns. All these factors have increased fixed operating costs exponentially for them.

Loss of Trust and Relevance: Many newer digital platforms are perceived as more democratic, participatory and transparent compared to the traditional gatekeeping model of mainstream media. The ability to rapidly share and spread news online has given rise to challenges around fake news, propaganda and deliberate misinformation.

This has shaken long-held perceptions of credibility, independence and trust associated with established newspapers, TV channels and magazines. Younger audiences, in particular, are turning more to social media and alternative online sources. Remaining relevant to changing audience interests and lifestyles online while maintaining high editorial standards is a constant struggle for traditional media companies.

Traditional media channels are facing an unprecedented challenge in the form of digital disruption. The migration of audiences online combined with the loss of advertising revenues to new platforms, changing consumer habits, higher operating costs, difficulties in leveraging emerging technologies and struggles around relevance and trust – have all significantly impacted the business models of newspapers, radio, television and magazines. Adapting to this digital transformation with innovative strategies remains a crucial challenge that these incumbents must overcome to survive and stay relevant in the future.