The Discord blocking incident of May 2025 revealed something critical: Reddit doesn’t just document platform practices—it actively circulates tactical knowledge that sustains banned platforms across campus networks. This transmedial complexity suggests a revision to the dissertation’s chapter structure, where Reddit occupies Chapter 2 not as static discourse archive but as...

I searched all eight CUNY subreddit databases for Discord mentions and found 894 posts across the entire archive. This dataset includes 337 original submissions and 557 comment responses spanning from June 2017 through September 2025. The broader timeline reveals three distinct patterns that inform our understanding of student publics and...

I searched eight CUNY subreddits for “shopping cart” mentions and found 630 posts spanning 2016 to 2025. Registration tactics spread from one mention in 2016 to 154 mentions in 2024 as students developed systematic workarounds for CUNYfirst’s inadequacies. A commercial app filled the gap that the university left open.

Analysis of metadiscourse across CUNY subreddits provides empirical validation for Michael Warner’s theoretical framework that “a public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse,” revealing how 4,447 instances of students discussing Reddit itself, subreddit norms, and community boundaries constitute the exact mechanism through which digital campus...

The universal scraper’s user discovery architecture (scripts/universal_reddit_scraper.py) implements snowball sampling parallel to qualitative interview methodology. Phase 1 user discovery (lines 283-336) extracts usernames from recent submissions, top posts, and controversial content to establish seed participants. Phase 1.2 network expansion (lines 338-391) performs iterative referral chain discovery: expand_user_network() examines each user’s...

I analyzed CUNY Reddit discourse from 2011-2013 and found patterns of institutional failure that predate COVID-19 by nearly a decade. The pandemic didn’t create new crises—it accelerated existing ones that students had been documenting for years.

Empirical validation of Chapter 1’s intensification claims through five targeted queries transforms abstract dissertation framework into evidence-anchored foundation, revealing how pandemic conditions amplified rather than created vernacular infrastructure that students had already constructed within institutional voids. Pre-pandemic temporal baseline analysis surfaces critical discovery that 11% of 2018-2019 posts occurred midnight-6am...

Comparative analysis of parenting and childcare discourse across CUNY, NYU, and Columbia databases reveals asymmetry in institutional support that manifests through what remains systematically unspoken. The 815 CUNY submissions mentioning parenting terms represent only 2.6% of total discourse despite CUNY serving predominantly non-traditional students. College of Staten Island emerges as...

Query for infrastructure-related discourse across eight CUNY databases surfaces 500+ instances of facility failures, validating Brier and Fabricant’s (2016) thesis that only 8% of CUNY buildings remain in good repair. Evidence concentrates around facility categories with measurable impact: elevator failures in comment_iphki91 where Baruch student reports “one was working out...

Analysis of artificial intelligence discourse across CUNY databases (May 2023-January 2025) reveals how students navigate learning technologies within institutional voids, showing not simple adoption patterns but ethical negotiations and collective norm creation mirroring pandemic-era peer support networks. submission_t3_1l5mni6 (66 upvotes) exemplifies mature usage where an Anatomy student uses ChatGPT for...

The investigation into typical compound crisis discussions reveals patterns of interconnected institutional barrier navigation that transcend simple topic co-occurrence, establishing foundation for the 679% increase in multi-topic discourse documented in the baseline intensification analysis. The most prevalent compound pattern emerges as financial aid + housing combinations where students describe tuition...

Audit of evidence distribution across three dissertation chapters surfaces organizational challenges requiring explicit allocation philosophy to maintain scholarly rigor. The discovery that submission_1akbu5y documenting advisor registration error with 631 upvotes appears in all three chapters exemplifies how high-impact evidence naturally migrates across analytical boundaries—serving as institutional failure example in Chapter...

Second phase of organizational revision advances Chapter 2 from skeletal outline at 9% completion toward substantive computational analysis at 37.9%, adding 1,516 words through strategic integration of validated statistics with human testimony. Expansion of Section 2.1.1 on user-centric scraping innovation positions the 14-year corpus of 545,895 posts (273,702 CUNY plus...

Validation of Chapter 3, Section 3.6 transit evidence found numerical discrepancies. Claimed “Queens to Manhattan” (487 times) and “Hunter to Queens” (312 times) were unsupported (actual: 0 and 5 exact matches), requiring revision to thematic co-occurrence: “queens” appears 1,897 times and “manhattan” 361 times in transit discourse, with major routes...

Validation of Chapter 1, Section 1.3 evidence found the claimed “won’t be able to” marker at 1.60x CUNY vs Columbia (not 13.63x as initially reported). Expanded analysis of barrier and tactical phrases showed CUNY discourse has 1.68x higher barrier language (“have to go in person,” “cannot enroll,” “too late to,”...

Query for infrastructure-related discourse across eight CUNY databases surfaces 500+ instances of facility failures, validating Brier and Fabricant’s (2016) thesis that only 8% of CUNY buildings remain in good repair. Evidence concentrates around facility categories with measurable impact: elevator failures in comment_iphki91 where Baruch student reports “one was working out...

Analysis of artificial intelligence discourse across CUNY databases (May 2023-January 2025) reveals how students navigate learning technologies within institutional voids, showing not simple adoption patterns but ethical negotiations and collective norm creation mirroring pandemic-era peer support networks. submission_t3_1l5mni6 (66 upvotes) exemplifies mature usage where an Anatomy student uses ChatGPT for...

The investigation into typical compound crisis discussions reveals patterns of interconnected institutional barrier navigation that transcend simple topic co-occurrence, establishing foundation for the 679% increase in multi-topic discourse documented in the baseline intensification analysis. The most prevalent compound pattern emerges as financial aid + housing combinations where students describe tuition...

Audit of evidence distribution across three dissertation chapters surfaces organizational challenges requiring explicit allocation philosophy to maintain scholarly rigor. The discovery that submission_1akbu5y documenting advisor registration error with 631 upvotes appears in all three chapters exemplifies how high-impact evidence naturally migrates across analytical boundaries—serving as institutional failure example in Chapter...

Second phase of organizational revision advances Chapter 2 from skeletal outline at 9% completion toward substantive computational analysis at 37.9%, adding 1,516 words through strategic integration of validated statistics with human testimony. Expansion of Section 2.1.1 on user-centric scraping innovation positions the 14-year corpus of 545,895 posts (273,702 CUNY plus...

Validation of Chapter 3, Section 3.6 transit evidence found numerical discrepancies. Claimed “Queens to Manhattan” (487 times) and “Hunter to Queens” (312 times) were unsupported (actual: 0 and 5 exact matches), requiring revision to thematic co-occurrence: “queens” appears 1,897 times and “manhattan” 361 times in transit discourse, with major routes...

Validation of Chapter 1, Section 1.3 evidence found the claimed “won’t be able to” marker at 1.60x CUNY vs Columbia (not 13.63x as initially reported). Expanded analysis of barrier and tactical phrases showed CUNY discourse has 1.68x higher barrier language (“have to go in person,” “cannot enroll,” “too late to,”...