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CSCI 0190 · Fall 2026

Finding BYO🔗

    1 What is This Assignment’s Purpose?

    2 Theme Song

    3 Problem Setup

    4 Assignment

    5 Built-Ins

    6 Starter

1 What is This Assignment’s Purpose?🔗

Network analysis isn’t limited to finding Paul Revere! We’ll apply it to other domains now.

2 Theme Song🔗

When You Wish Upon A Star by Leigh Harline, Ned Washington, Cliff Edwards

3 Problem Setup🔗

Your job is to find another dataset that has characteristics similar to the Paul Revere dataset. (BYO = “Bring Your Own”.)

Please do not share your own or anyone else’s personal data!

4 Assignment🔗

Once you have identified a dataset that interests you:

  1. Hypothesize what you expect to find. Record this hypothesis.

  2. Run your code.

  3. Investigate how good your hypothesis was.

You should then submit a brief writeup telling us where you got the dataset, why it’s interesting (to you), what you were looking for, what you found, and what you learned as a result.

Your writeup must also answer the following question. Assume that your code is correct. Therefore, the output of your code is making some statement about the world that it studied. (Depending on the question, it may be presenting a decision-maker with seemingly actionable information to make, say, a policy decision.) In what ways might the answer not, in fact, be a true reflection of that world? Typically, this means interrogating weaknesses in your input (e.g., problems with the dataset), though it may also include weaknesses in the process (i.e., the methods you used to compute the answer). Reflect deeply!

Your report should not be longer than one page, and much shorter is also fine, so long as it gives us a good sense of the work you did.

5 Built-Ins🔗

You may find Pyret’s Google Drive Spreadsheet library helpful for importing data.

6 Starter🔗

Starter (opens in a new tab)

You should build on your own code from Finding Paul. You can use whichever representation and algorithms you want.

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