Cindy Espinosa

About Me

Name: Cindy Espinosa
Email: cje2127 (at) barnard.edu
Office:
Home Institution: Barnard College of Columbia University
Project: Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis

About My Project

My project focuses on developing a software to help qualitative researchers with the affinity diagram process, which is currently difficult to scale as the amount of data scales to a greater extent. My partner is Ariel Goldman, and Professor Morrison-Smith is our mentor.

This research was carried out as part of the Barnard Computer Science - Summer Research program and was supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

Research Log

Week 1

This week our group of researchers met, and my partner Ariel. We read and took notes on Avidnote about a set of research papers in the qualitative HCI field.We also prepared a presentation on an introduction to our research for the DIMACS group of around 70 people.

Week 2

Earlier this week my partner, Ariel and I, presented on the research papers we had read. We also presented our research introduction.

This week I began reading and finding reseaerch papers to explore our problem space, and determine if our research questions have been answered, and limitations we could pursue from other studies.

On Friday, June 5th 2020, I attended Professor Lydia Chilton's talk virtuallyon AI tools and creative work.

Week 3

This week I attended the Data Science bootcamptaught by the char of the Computer Science department at Rutgers, Professor Matthew Stone. We will be exploring datasets, statistical significance, model fitting, visualization, text and sentiment classification, and clustering analysis.

My partner and I will be finding and reading relevant papers this week in prepreparation for our user interviews

Week 4

This week we began writing our abstract and related work based on the paperes we colllected. Instead of interviewing partipants due to IRB logistics, our team will begin designing a system using personas and storyboards.

Week 5

This week we are brainstorming and identifying/creating personas for our system. We created 6 personas along with storyboards for two primary personas and scenarios. This exercise helped us identify the key features that would be the most helpful in our system.

Week 6

We started working on wireframes for our system. Our team used Balsamiq wireframing tool. We are also workiing on our abstract and related work that we received feedback on from our mentor.

Week 7

We continued working on our wireframes of our system and features. We also continued work on our related work and began our introduction.

Week 8

I gave feedback to the paper our peers wrote. I attended a presentation by Dr. Cynthia Rudin. I worked on writing parts of our system, and editing previous parts of our paper, as well as future and limitations and conclusion. We are also prepping for our presentation to the DIMACS group.

References & Links

Below are my mentor, partner, and REU websites: