Orientation

Welcome

MC 451 · Fall 2026

• Dr. Alex Leith, Dunham Hall 1017, aleith@siue.edu
• Office hours TuTh 12:30 to 1:45 and 3:30 to 5:00, or by appointment
• We meet TuTh 11:00 to 12:15, Science East 2268
• Everything lives on the course site: syllabus, schedule, setup guides
• The textbook is free and online. There is nothing to buy.

What this course actually is

• Not a course about research. A course where you do research, start to finish.
• You will take a real dataset, ask your own question of it, and defend an answer
• By December you will have written and published a White Paper
• No prior coding required. No math beyond arithmetic and careful reading.
• We go slow, in order, and every assignment feeds the final paper

The dataset

One week of Twitch, November 2018

• 21,964,296 chat messages across 1,695 channels
• 590,876 stream snapshots: who was streaming what, to how many people
• Real, messy, public data, the kind you would actually encounter in the field
• Bob Ross averaged 3,178 concurrent viewers that week. xQc averaged 17,363.
• Your job this term is to turn a curiosity about that world into a defensible claim

How the term is built

The Journalist runs the whole way through: a weekly reading journal, 10 points a week across the 14 teaching weeks in Weeks 1 to 15, plus 10 for consistency, 150 points. It is the habit, not a stage.

The project itself moves through four stages, and each hands you the materials for the next:

1,000 points total.

Mark Week 11 now

Two assignments land in the same week, on purpose:

• Sampling Plan and Pilot, 75 points, the last Builder assignment
• Data Wrangling, 50 points, the first Analyst assignment

That is 125 points due Friday, November 6, the heaviest week of the term. The Sampling Plan gets an extra week because a pilot done properly takes one. Put Week 11 in your calendar today and draft the sampling plan during Week 10.

The Architect (Weeks 1 to 4)

Setting up the machinery and choosing your ground:

• Syllabus Contract, 25 points
• GitHub Profile, 25 points
• Project Setup, 25 points
• Librarian Visit Report, 50 points

By the end of Week 4 you have working tools and a literature you can stand on.

The Builder (Weeks 5 to 11)

Where the study gets designed, one decision at a time:

• Annotated Manuscript, 25 · Project Prospectus, 25 · Topic Selection and RQs, 25
• Definitions Practice, 25 · Codebook and Qual Memo, 50
• Sampling Plan and Pilot, 75 · CITI Ethics Certification, 25

250 points. Every one of these becomes a section of your final paper.

The Analyst (Weeks 11 to 13)

The three R assignments, in order of difficulty:

• Data Wrangling, 50 points
• Describing Data, 75 points
• Inferencing Data, 100 points

You will run these on my dataset first. The code you write here is the code you reuse on your own analysis. That is deliberate.

The Publisher (Weeks 15 to 17)

• The White Paper, 250 points, published to the web
• An executive summary, your literature, your methods, your findings, your limits
• It is not a term paper. It is the document a client or a conference would read.
• You will have written most of it already, in pieces, across the term

The tools

Four things to install

• R: the language that does the counting and the statistics
• VS Code: the editor where you write code and prose in one place
• Quarto: turns your work into a website, a PDF, or a paper
• Git and GitHub: version control, so your work has a history and a home

Nothing here costs money. Setup walkthroughs are on the course site.

What R actually looks like

Do not panic. This is a full analysis:

library(v2v)
chat <- twitch_chat()

chat %>%
  group_by(channel) %>%
  summarise(messages = n()) %>%
  arrange(desc(messages))

Read it out loud: take the chat data, group it by channel, count the messages, sort from most to least. That is all code is: instructions in order.

What Quarto gives you

• One document holds your writing, your code, and your results together
• Change the data, re-render, and every number in your paper updates
• No more pasting a chart into a document and hoping it is still current
• Output to a website, a Word file, or a PDF from the same source
• Your White Paper will be a Quarto document

Why version control

• Git keeps a time-stamped history of every change you make
• If you break something, you can go back to when it worked
• GitHub puts that history online, which is where your paper will live
• It is also how you show your work: a reviewer can retrace every step
• Reproducibility is not a nicety here. It is the standard of evidence.

How the week works

• Tuesday teaches a concept
• Thursday applies it to your own project, in labs and studios
• The reading comes before Tuesday. The journal entry closes the week.
• Assignments are due Friday of the week listed, by 11:59 PM
• The full session-by-session schedule is in the syllabus, S1 through S28

On using AI

• AI tools are permitted as a supervised aid, and you must disclose their use
• Note in your journal what you used it for and how you checked its output
• You are responsible for every claim and every line of code you submit
• Using it to avoid learning R will show up in the Analyst weeks, when the code gets harder
• Ask me if you are unsure whether a use is appropriate

Before Thursday

• Sign the Syllabus Contract (due this week)
• Skim Chapter 1 on the course site: aura-lab-siue.github.io/v2v
• Start the software setup if you can. We will troubleshoot together in Week 2.
• Bring questions. The first three weeks are the ones where asking pays off most.