Goal 1 – Identify Key Themes in Online Students Conversations Using Text Mining:
This goal focuses on analyzing public online conversations from platforms like Reddit, Instagram comments, public Discord channels, and Yik Yak summaries to discover what students talk about most.
By using text-mining tools such as VOYANT, the project identifies recurring themes such as stress, academic pressure, mental health, housing, campus resources, and social life. The purpose is to create a clearer picture of student experiences based on their own digital communication
Audience for this goal 1:
- WCU students who want to see what issues their peers are discussing
- Faculty and advisors who want insight into student needs
- Student support services (counseling, tutoring, success, centers)
- Administrators who want to understand student concerns more deeply
Connection to DH for goal 1:
This goal aligns with Digital Humanities values by using computational text analysis to study culture and communication. It treats online conversations as digital cultural artifacts and uses digital tools like Voyant to reveal patterns that would be difficult to see manually. It supports DH commitments to understanding communities, analyzing digital culture, and making data-driven interpretations of human experiences.
Goal 2 – Visualize Student Concerns Through Accessible, Public-Facing Digital Tools:
This goal focuses on transforming the analyzed text into clear, accessible visualizations such as word clouds, frequency charts, topic clusters, and sentiment patterns. These visualizations help make student concerns easy to understand for non-technical audiences. The project aims to present finding in a way that is transparent, visually engaging, and useful for decision making.
Audience for this goal 2:
- Students who benefit from seeing their experiences represented visually
- Faculty and staff who need clear, digestible data to inform support strategies
- Administrators who rely on visual summaries to understand campus-wide issues
- Researchers studying digital communication or student culture
Connection to DH for goal 2:
This goal aligns with DH values of accessibility, open knowledge, and public scholarship. By turning raw text into visual, interpretable data, the project supports DH commitments to making information understandable, transparent, and available to broader audiences. It also reflects DH best practices in documentation, visualization, and ethical communication of data.