I, once again, spent way too much time trying to accomplish a task before giving up and trying a new method. I tried to build an R function that would pull the titles all New York Times articles from 1860-2021 that mentioned a particular phrase and save them by year in separate datasets — I’m sure it’s possible but after days of running into errors and suppressing the urge to throw my computer out the window, I gave up and found a function someone else had already written that counts the number of articles that mention a specific keyword/phrase each year. So, problem solved! But I once again lost a lot of time.
My to-do list for this week is… to put together my presentation and fine tune how I present my argument to make it a little more compelling. I think things will come together nicely, though! I’m a little less optimistic about having a solid draft of my final project by the end of the week, so whatever I share to the class may be a bit limited or perhaps not very pretty, but… we will see. The major hurdles have been cleared!
One reply on “Week 12 Update”
Not super pretty is fine for a conference! Sometimes just the process of putting things into a shape for others to look at is helpful in getting yourself to focus on the essentials for the final version. I look forward to seeing how you combine the headlines with your other data!