Cornell Data Journal is a club of around 40 people, whose goal is to provide students with the opportunity to publish journalistic stories about specific topics in small groups, using data as the main piece of evidence for their narrative. Beyond technical experience, as a social club, CDJ also attempts to provide students with an opportunity to develop relationships with other people, form communities of like-minded individuals, and grow as a person. But just how well does CDJ accomplish that growth?
This project was largely inspired by a Bocconi University study in May 2025 that predicted the Pope using network statistics. After viewing that, I thought to do something similar with Cornell Data Journal, a club that I help lead. After following a tutorial on network analysis in Python/Gephi over the summer, as well as enlisting help from Emi Labbe (a CDJ member and friend who knew more about networks than I did), I was able to complete this project.
- Microsoft Forms
- Easy way of obtaining the survey data at the start of the semester and at the end of the semester
- Jupyter Notebooks (networkx, Pandas, NumPy)
- Python libraries used in Jupyter Notebooks to parse survey data into workable networks
- Gephi
- Software for visualizing the network data from surveys
- Notes on how to replicate the visuals are found under VISUALS.md
- LaTeXMathML.js
- Helpful library to implement LaTeX rendering of math equations used in article
- Excel
- Miscellaneous data processing and cleaning
- HTML, CSS
- Creating the website to display the article, including some interactive elements
- Figma
- Designing icons that made up the images within the website