This is the repository for my Digitial Humanities 101 Project.
This individual project investigated the youth perception of sexual education and other related taboo topics in India, using data from a survey that I conducted in May 2020. It aimed to showcase the discontent, dissatisfaction and information gap that existed between what the youth want to know about sexual education and what is actually being taught to them. I believed that there was a need to start addressing sex as more than just a biological phenomenon. To this effect, I used matplotlib, seaborn, gensim, scikit and pandas libraries in Python to analyse demographic distribution of participants and encode the rated responses of the participants regarding measures of importance of topics, sexual policing experiences and frequency of addressal in schooling systems. I also employed Topic Modeling (LDA and Word2Vec) along with pyLDAvis visualisations to extract topics from the free responses of participants on how the corpus of taboo topics was dealt with in educational institutions. The results matched my hypothesis in that a large proportion of participants felt that the topics were never addressed in school but at the same time they ranked them high in importance. This indicated the information gap and need for curricular change policies. Four main topics were extracted which indicate that sex education and the taboo topics were treated in a hostile manner, taught and not discussed with the students. Dialogue on gender identity and mental health were rare and sex was indeed likely to be treated as biological phenomenon. I think that the survey should be interpreted by centering it on the Perceptual results and use the demographic and textual analysis results as supplementary data to add evidence and credibility to the results from the Perceptual section. While preliminary, conducting more such surveys using a more representative sample would be the best move forward.
The repository contains the following:
- Jupyter Notebook with the code and markdown exploring the data analysis
- The images with all the figures and graphs created using the Survey Data.
- A Poster with the entire research summarised, along with figures and interpretations