Over the past year, I had the opportunity to partake in two research projects at DePaul
University with Nathan Matteson and other faculty. The first project was a python written project
analyzing a COHA (Corpus of Historical American English) database of words from 1810 to 2010 to attempt
finding a correlation between design and other words in the dataset. From these correlations, we were
able to draw some conclusions about the way the word design has changed over time. For example, design
used to be very closely related to religious words likely because of the use of "God's design," whereas
now it has become much more secular in line with words like architecture and creativity.
The second research project I was involved in was to help improve the user interface of a website that
displays the ways that energy is produced in the US. The accompanying research paper is written by
associate professor Elizabeth Moyer at University of Chicago. Some of the issues tackled included
providing more contrast to the page, redesigning interactive elements, and determining a hierarchy of
information visually.
Before Redesign
After Redesign
alternate format for differently sized browser
