Drawing Connections

Sowmithra M -

Hey everyone! I’d like to start off by talking about my discussion last week with Koorosh, the post-doc student. We talked about his work and what he looks at. Unlike Dr. Garcia who looks at the acceleration period of a transition, Koorosh looks at post-transition and how changes affect the community. I also asked him how to handle looking at large volume of documents, data, and such. He offered the following advice: rather than reading every line, look at drivers of change and how the system reacts to it. What caused the change? In short, he suggested looking with a purpose instead of merely sifting through data. After my talk with Koorosh, I worked on the last of my background readings. Then, I had a meeting with Dr. Garcia to update her on my progress.

Since then and as for this week, I have so far completed drawing connections individually in the background readings and city data. I am now in the works of writing short paragraphs for each city and the overall readings. I will wait until I’m done watching meetings to write an overall 1 – 2 page summary. I have started attending meetings and watching recordings of previous ones, but it is taking a while since some may be 1 hour but most are 2 – 3 hour long discussions. Something I didn’t say last week but struck my mind recently is the fact that the readings, meetings, and data are all 3 different perspectives with varying audiences. The difference in audience of academics, public, or stakeholders is an added layer of depth that must be looked at when comparing the perspectives. As for my place, it is interesting to be a ‘sponge’ and absorb all the information. 

For the rest of the week, I’ll be continuing watching meetings and hopefully have watched a sufficient amount to write the summary paper by next week. Today, I’m going in person to meet Dr. Garcia again and hope to meet another student in her team to learn more about R studio plotting. Thanks for reading! 

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Comments:

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    camillebennett
    Great point about the differences in audience, Sowmithra. Do you anticipate these differences impacting your data?
    sowmithra_m
    I don't believe this will impact my data analysis because I have separate variables for public attention, water stress, net financial position, and institutional structure. The relationship between these variables and how the differences affect transition are exactly what I am looking at, so in that aspect, it will work out nicely.

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