SIM Lab @ SIUE

Lab Projects

01 — Flagship Projects

The lab's major initiatives — spanning open education, qualitative research tooling, and production infrastructure for the department.

Open Science / OER

The Teaching Ecosystem

A unified open-education stack for undergraduate research methods at SIUE — a CC BY 4.0 textbook, a course delivery platform, and an R package that ties them together. Built to make methods instruction transparent, reproducible, and accessible.

From Vibes to Variables

A 22-chapter Quarto Book guiding undergrads from curiosity to a reproducible study using a real dataset of 1,792 songs. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

View on GitHub

Open Methods Hub

The Quarto website that delivers course materials, weekly modules, and interactive content for MC-451 Research Methods at SIUE.

View on GitHub

coursepackR

The companion R package that bundles textbook chapters, assignment templates, and the curated music dataset for reproducible classroom use.

View on GitHub
Qualitative Research

MethodoSync

A browser-based qualitative research tool for video annotation and codebook generation. Built with React, TypeScript, and Vite — paste transcripts or YouTube links, apply grounded codes, collapse to axial categories, and export structured Markdown or Excel codebooks. No server required; all processing happens in the browser.

Launch App
Production App

The Cage

The MassComm Checkout System — a full-stack production application for managing and reserving departmental production equipment at SIUE. Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL, featuring Microsoft Entra SSO authentication, QR-based checkout workflows, and a dual-database architecture with Prisma ORM.

02 — Tools & Resources

More from the Lab

Teaching Tool

Comm Theories Explorer

An interactive, GSAP-animated guide to common mass communication theories — designed to help students identify and understand an appropriate theory for their research project.

Launch App
NLP Package

TASS

Text Analysis & Sentiment System — a Python/R NLP package for word count and sentiment analysis of social media data, with extensible custom dictionaries for communication research.

View on GitHub
Career Planning

MC Careers Dashboard

An interactive SvelteKit dashboard mapping Mass Communications career paths, salary data, and skill requirements — built to help students plan their professional trajectories.

View on GitHub
DevOps

Open WebUI Launcher

A one-click Python/Docker tool for deploying local LLM instances via Ollama and Open WebUI — with hardware checks and classroom-safe defaults for research and teaching workflows.

View on GitHub
Research Data

Hate Raids

R-based data and analysis underlying the peer-reviewed Hate Raids paper — examining coordinated harassment campaigns on Twitch using computational text analysis methods.

View on GitHub
Teaching Tool

Banned Word Checker

A Python tool for testing Word documents or PDF submissions against a configurable list of prohibited terms — built for instructional and academic content-review workflows.

View on GitHub