Nina Di Cara

Nina Di Cara

PhD student, researching mental health on social media

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Paper-a-day bot with no code required

3 minute read

Published:

This year I wanted to have a go at a paper-a-day challenge; reading one paper every (working) day. Over the last year I have been building up a list of papers ‘to-read’ but never getting around to them, and generally not making reading much of a priority when other things have been busy. Trying to read a paper a day seems (probably naively) like a good way to quickly get through some of my outstanding reading lists, and prepare for doing a lot more thesis writing over the next year or so.

Setting up GitHub Actions for a Django project

8 minute read

Published:

I’ve been hoping to use my current work on the Mood Music project to test out GitHub Actions for continuous integration (CI). There are a few extra steps needed for the Django set up because of databases etc so this is a little guide to save my future self the pain of figuring it all out again.

Useful Python to R translations

3 minute read

Published:

After spending 3 months on a Python project (see the COVID-19 community map here!) I’ve gone back to an R project that I started in 2019. After getting used to using Python there have been a few functions that I’ve really missed in R, so I’ve collected a few substitutes that I’ve found.

The COVID-19 Community Support Map

2 minute read

Published:

While the pandemic has derailed a lot of plans we have had the opportunity to work on a project with Public Health Wales, developing a novel data visualisation platform that helps identify vulnerable communities in Wales.

Announcement: JGI Seed Corn Winners!

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Really excited to share that we have won a seedcorn grant from the Jean Golding Insitute for Data Intensive Science to pursue an idea about how we can infer wellbeing from music listening behaviours.

New (Academic) Year Resolutions 2019/20

2 minute read

Published:

Given how much I love the start of the new academic year (recovering addiction to fresh stationary), I thought I’d do a post to mark the start of the ‘new year’ and the start of my second year of my PhD with the things I’ve been thinking about achieving this year…

Building a reproducible analysis framework

6 minute read

Published:

Since starting in research I’ve learnt some home truths about reproducibility in science. Thanks some fantastic researchers (listed at the end) I’ve also been taught some amazing lessons about reproducibility, and how to do it. So much so that I can’t see why you would work any other way, which is itself testament to the power of educating a new generation of scientists with lessons learned.

MQ Mental Health Science 2019

8 minute read

Published:

Writing this up a little late, but at the beginning of February I got to attend MQ’s Mental Health Science conference. It was a two-day conference with a huge range of speakers talking about all sorts of research related to mental health, and was my first conference!

Tweet Semantics in Python

7 minute read

Published:

One of my PhD aims will be around analysing data from Tweets using machine learning/ NLP (natural language processing, not neuro-linguistic programming – social work problems).

blog

Yes, algorithms are racist (because we are)

5 minute read

Published:

A journalist tweeted this week that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said that algorithms, driven by math, are racist. Something about the way the tweet was written struck me as sceptical, and many people in tech seemed to feel the same way. A lot of tech-experienced people weighed in to defend AOC, because if you have an understanding of how algorithms are made, and the existence of systemic racism, then you’ll understand that she’s right.

Merging Multiple Dataframes in R

1 minute read

Published:

I’m publishing this on the blog in case anyone else has been facing the same problem as me and is unsure how to get around it!