In the third week, we only had two meetings, which are one meeting with my DataCamp group and one general meeting of all students and supervisor doctors as a weekly discussion. Group meetings were held on Tuesday, August 16, 2022, while weekly general meetings or discussions were held on Friday, August 19, 2022.
Group Meeting: DataCamp Project
At the first meeting in the third week, which is the group meeting, we discussed with dr. Budi regarding the final project on the DataCamp platform. We got a project called “A Text Analysis of Trump’s Tweets”. As the title implies, the project aims to analyze tweets (posts uploaded on the Twitter platform) uploaded by the account of Donald Trump, the former president of the United States of America (USA).
A Twitter user stated that the tweets uploaded on Donald Trump’s account had some patterns based on the characteristics of the sentences uploaded and the device used. Therefore, by analyzing the tweets from Donald Trump’s account that went through several processes, we can find out the truth of the statement.
At this meeting, we have already worked on several stages of the project, and we planned to continue the project at another meeting.
To my mind, this project is very interesting to do and can be implemented in the world of public health. For instance, we can analyze tweets about health issues that are currently going viral, such as hoax information about Covid-19 vaccines and acute hepatitis with unknown causes.
Weekly Discussion: REDCap
At this meeting, there were two discussions, which are the progress of the DataCamp course and project for each group and the introduction of REDCap which is software for data collection. However, the main discussion was the introduction of REDCap
Regarding the progress of my group, especially the progress on DataCamp courses and projects, it was good enough by working together so that we can discuss with each other. However, I felt it was necessary for us to improve the work on the project, given the EHASP time which will end at the end of this August. In addition, dr. Yayan also suggested to us to work on the project directly without doing the course requirements first so that we can know our ability to directly analyze the data.
After the discussion about the progress of each group, dr. Yayan introduced and explained a software for data collection (surveys) and database, which is based on the website, that is REDCap. REDCap or Research Electronic Data Capture has various features and advantages, such as a fully optional survey, high enough security, and flexible settings. However, REDCap does have a less attractive user interface (UI) design and is quite confusing for a beginner.
I believe, the introduction to REDCap was quite important, especially if we want to conduct research that involves collecting quite a lot of data. I think with REDCap, data collection would be better and neater and can be analyzed immediately because we can export data in various forms, such as in R and SPSS.