Week 2 Update!

Wow, feels like a while since I’ve posted!

First, I’d like to update you on what Vanessa and I have accomplished this week on our project.

Due to our mentors being out of town for most of this week and our first meeting not being until Thursday, we did a lot of our own work the first 3 days. At our meeting last Friday, Patrick noted that our weekly task was to find citations that would help justify why we needed to gather specific user_data from a population in our future Facebook Extension Application and to write why we thought it would be beneficial for us to use this data from our users. Here’s a picture of the list of things we would have to get permission for through Facebook for Developers:

CapturePermissions

The citations we used to justify why we needed specific data from users in our app also led us to find a ton of related work revolving around online health communities and web-based social matching, which made it very easy to write an outline of our related works since we had found so many papers. Vanessa and I both made separate citation trees: mine was focusing on online health communities and how support would be beneficial to the rare disease population, and her’s was more about social matching and where it has been used before and how we could develop an algorithm similar. Here’s our citation trees!

Grace's Citation Tree (may have to zoom in)

Grace’s Citation Tree
(may have to zoom in)

Vanessa's Citation Tree

Vanessa’s Citation Tree

Secondly, in the time I spent finding papers to use as citations to justify, I also completed my personal, professional website! Click here to check it out: Website. Also, I developed my own professional twitter: Twitter!

Then, after hours of searching for papers that would grant us permission to use this data, we compiled a rough outline of our Related Works and Methods section. We left the INFO building after Professional Development workshop on Wednesday to head over to a library meeting room and brainstorm ideas on the huge whiteboard. Here’s some pics:

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The next day, Vanessa and I typed up our rough outline and started inputting citations from articles we had read over the past few days. As we couldn’t meet with Fernando or Patrick till Thursday, we just went with what we had, as it is just a draft for now and we could change it later. We both inserted citations and added more and more to the outline.  Finally, we input all of our outline into ShareLatex, and I’m VERY proud of the outcome. We situated all of our sections and subsections, along with our references. It’s so beautiful, I almost shed a tear. See a PDF of our outline here (BUT REMEMBER IT IS A DRAFT SO YES IT IS NOT COMPLETELY DONE): Facebook Extension Outline

Thursday, we met with Fernando at 2PM in his office to go over our progress thus far. Our goal is to meet Fernando every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but since he was out of town for vacation most of the week, we decided to meet Thursday and then Friday with Patrick (who we have scheduled to always meet on Friday). Here’s a picture of my meeting notes, which may make no sense to you, but is what Vanessa and I used to alter our outline. He made it very clear which holes we needed to fill and what to expand on – which included our method. IMG_3167 (I took these notes in a notebook I call my “Idea Notebook” – also I apologize for the sloppiness but this is the notebook where I scribble all the time in)

As of right now since we have not yet been granted permission to access user data, we do not have a clear set method as to how this will go. But, our goal is to talk further about it with Patrick at our meeting on Friday at 2PM. There, we will also ask him what he thinks of our outline and what suggestions, comments, or changes he has to share with us. We also have a list of questions (seen above) that we plan on asking Patrick.

This week may have been busy, but overall I am proud of the work I accomplished. We got a lot done in a short amount of time, and we split up tasks into smaller pieces to address them in more of a timely manner.  Luckily since I was pretty familiar with the rare disease population and different kinds of online health communities and support, it was easy to recall certain works and search for more articles. I’m so excited to keep working on this project!