Examining the Impact of COVID-19 on Canadian University Reddit Communities: A Text Mining and Visualization Approach [Funder: Carleton University COVID-19 Rapid Research Response Grants]

Canadian universities have over 1.4 million students, employ over 300,000 people, and are a $35B enterprise. The impact of COVID-19 on higher education has been immense and will be long-lasting. This project examines the impacts of COVID-19 on the most important university stakeholder: the student. It relies on text mining and network visualization techniques to explore the 20 most active Canadian university Reddit sites. Reddit provides real-time authentic student community response to the COVID crisis and is increasingly being used for studies of online communities. Results from this project will include an understanding of what COVID-related topics student communities are talking about during the COVID crisis; whether/how topics discussed changed through critical event periods experienced during the crisis; and whether/how student community topics are similar/different than what were experienced during a similar time frame in the previous non-COVID year. This project will have widespread impacts for educators, administrators, government legislators, academics, and students.