Iran’s political climate has experienced a series of social protests in the past few years. These episodes were caused by different issues and aimed at different ideals and demands which has given rise to the debate if they should be considered as divergent, scattered protest activities or if they all can be seen as different aspects of a single problem. While many scholars have tried to find the shared problematic of these movements merely in their political aspects, I am instead interested in looking for this common ground at the level of collective imagination, which is not solely political, but is at the intersection of culture, politics, and history. “Ordinary life” is a relatively new phrase that started to prevail among the public as an ideal that both used to exist in Iran’s contemporary past and is now going on in other nations of the world. It is not exactly clear what is meant by “ordinary life,” but Iranians seem to imagine a variety of different matters: from cultural freedoms to financial stability, from more social tolerance to a more normalized relationship with Western countries, etc. However, it is unknown if all these different matters come together to make a homogeneous perception of an “ordinary life,” which is shared by all genders, classes, and ethnicities, or if they divergently map onto different social strata in ways that do not allow for any unification.

What I have been doing this summer in the Studio’s fellowship is to learn how I can use computational text analysis methods to answer this question of homogeneity vs. heterogeneity. I have been reading about natural language processing methods of analysis and thinking about how I can incorporate them into my research as each of them comes with some strengths and limitations. I have also begun to learn introductory Python as a skillset necessary for the application of computational text analysis. My goal is to get to the point where I can understand and experiment with some of the relevant Python libraries and packages. Hopefully at the end of the summer I can write up a reflection note on what methods I have learned about, how they are relevant to my research question, and what specific Python libraries I have used and if they have worked out well. In addition to this, I am aiming to code a word cloud program as a simple first step in my programming journey.