After meeting with Liz (our new LC Teacher of the Year, whoohoo!), I had a lot to work on. I spent a lot of time on my results section, added all the data from my survey, and took out some discussion material from my results. It made it easier to flesh out my discussion once I added sections to it: survey and content analysis results. There is still a lot to be done in my discussion, but now that I’ve reorganized a bit I’m feeling more confident. Specifically, I need to talk more about online interactions, personal vs. virtual networks, information as assistance, “othering” in terms of building bridging and bonding social capital, the absence of specific third place characteristics, and more about pre-storm vs. storm post differences and similarities. In addition, I need to go talk to Jim to set up a statistical significance test to compare both periods of analysis. Whew! That is a lot to do in the next week and a half.
I’ve been having some trouble finding sources on somewhat specific things I’m searching for, such as the interaction between humans and animals during Hurricane Katrina. There are articles about organizations that tried to help rescue animals, and also articles about humans being distraught after being separated from their animals, but I’m looking more at the role animal-human relations played in the entire process of evacuation and then recovery. Additionally, articles on how information can be a form of help are hard to find. Now that there are specific ideas I’m looking for, it’s more difficult to find what I need. Perhaps it’s time to pay a visit to a research librarian, though I’ve never met with one of them before now.
Festival of scholars, which feels like an eternity ago, was just last Friday. I found it to be a helpful experience explaining my work to people, because I was able to boil it down to the most essential information, and also gauge what the most interesting findings to them were based off of their questions and facial expressions. People found the switching of Help and Information percentages to be interesting, and a lot of people asked how many people actually use Nextdoor, so I should include that. In fact, around 675 people in Collins View have signed up on Nextdoor, and I believe there are around 800 households, but I should double check that number. I’ll be sure to add those insights and highlight them more in my paper.
Here is draft number 2!