Research is hard.

Quick summary notes about progress so far - lots of thinking and ruminating and worrying, but feeling better today:

  1. Ethics submitted after several painfully late nights.
  2. Ethics came back with a lot of questions and a clear requirement to simplify scope and make permissions clearer.
  3. Chatted with supervisor, managed to narrow scope - remove log of data sources (would be a huge duplicate of things that exist anyway). Only retrospective collections in order to avoid changing behaviour. Was originally planning to get rid of the interviews too, but…
  4. whilst revising the ethics I worried I still needed interviews for proper context of the actions.
  5. also worried about if retrospective would provide enough info. After some review of sources - I think probably yes.
  6. Chatted with K, which helped emphasise to me that privacy+consent is always going to be a tough issue and sometimes you need to be more thoughtful than you had originally. I gained a lot of useful perspective. Also worried that just auditing closed sources won’t be interesting enough as a result of this convo. this combines with (4) to push me back over to wanting to add interviews in again. Another important point was that people are likely to ignore @all notifications on slack. As I mark 32 unread slack notifications read from a hackathon, I’m inclined to agree.
  7. Woke up with renewed determination and a plan that might work? targeted interviews based on slacklogs. Be prepared to remove interviews if supervisor thinks I’m extending too far again.

some ruminations:

  • Useful preprint for data sources: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340687152_Leveraging_Data_Science_To_Combat_COVID-19_A_Comprehensive_Review/link/5ea55133a6fdccd794550d80/download - has useful text mining suggestions for twitter
  • GISAID scraper takedown request - https://github.com/bioinf-mcb/gisaid-scrapper/issues/15