Week 5: How to Clean Without a Broom

Niyathi k -

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Week 5 of my blog! I’m glad to see you all tune back in for some exciting updates on my progress with my project on the commodification of gua sha. Now, I hope this week’s title wasn’t too misleading for you all: today’s blog post isn’t about that type of cleaning but actually about the last step of my data collection process: cleaning the data set.

If you don’t remember from last week, I had just finished collecting my full sample of data. I collected 200 scripts total: 50 each from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X. I thought it was a tedious process on Instagram and TikTok because I had to manually transcribe the video audio. What I didn’t realize then was that cleaning the data set would be even more tedious. I went through each piece of data from each app. First, I consolidated what I had transcribed from the video audio and whatever text had appeared on screen/in the description box. I had decided at the beginning of data collection to analyze the video’s audio and text, so I kept that consistent throughout the whole process. Then, I went and deleted any filler words in the transcribed scripts (i.e. “um”). Since I had transcribed each content creator’s exact words, there were a lot of filler words that would’ve made analyzing the data more difficult. Now that I have a more optimized data set, I’m confident that my analysis and coding process will be a lot more manageable!

Speaking of the analysis and coding process, that’s what I plan to start next week! I’ve already prepared two coding charts: one for authentic language and one for commodified language. I’m planning to finish coding at least half of my data set next week but that’s pretty ambitious. Check back in next week to see if I accomplish my goal!

 

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    sriya_s
    Hi Niyathi, glad to see you were able to move past a difficult portion of your project! Would you be able to provide an example of what your coding charts look like? What keywords are you looking for?
    March 17, 2025 at 10:42 am - Reply
    niyathi_k
    Hey Sriya! Thanks for checking in! If you take a look at my third blog post (titled "Week 3: How to Code Without a Laptop"), I included both of my coding charts there
    March 18, 2025 at 10:46 am - Reply
    madeleine_k
    Hi Niyathi! Cleaning data sets sounds like a lot of work, and I found the part where you talked about deleting filler words to be particularly interesting. Were there any other filler words besides "um" that you consistently saw and had to delete?
    March 18, 2025 at 1:28 pm - Reply
    niyathi_k
    Hi Maddie! "Um" was the only one that I saw consistently across all of the apps. "Actually," "You know," and "I mean" were a few others that popped up occasionally.
    March 19, 2025 at 3:01 pm - Reply

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