Category: Data Science for Humanities Majors
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Cruise Control, or Why Katie Ledecky Dominates Distance Freestyle
I began paying attention to Katie Ledecky, the American distance swimmer, after Brian Phillips wrote a fantastic profile on her for Grantland, in the fall of 2014. Ledecky was seventeen then; she had been the reigning world record-holder in the women’s 800 meter freestyle for over 2 years. Actually, reigning, which suggests stasis, isn’t the…
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Do the Jitterbug (an analysis of cold brew efficacy using D3.js)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink… Just kidding! My kitchen sink barely holds one wriggling (fat) pug. In truth, I write this melting, Elmira-style, in the peak of #heatdome2016. Temperatures like these (mid 90’s, egads!), merit rewards merely for enduring them, and what is a five dollar vat of caffeine if not a…
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So You Want to Be a Data Analyst, Chapter 4:Visualizing Your Data with D3js
A picture is worth 1,000 words, or so throw pillows tell me. A good data visualization can be worth millions of rows (or thousands, or billions, even, depending on the size of the data you’re illustrating). Conversely, a bad data visualization, put into the wrong hands, can be just as harmful as a photoshopped Sandy doomsday photo. The previous…
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So You Want to Be A Data Analyst, Chapter 3: The Relational Database
In his short story Funes, the Memorious, the Argentine writer Jorge Borges writes of a teenager, Funes, whose mind contains the world, and all of its history. To access this information, Funes devises a system of one-to-one enumeration. “In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Mdximo Perez; in place of seven…
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So You Want to Be a Data Analyst, Chapter 2: The API (Is Just an ATM in The Sky)
Before you can extract any insights from data, you need to have the data in the first place. If you’re lucky, you do have the data sitting pretty in a database or can easily export it from its source origin. If you don’t, however, you can hit up an API to get it. You also…
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So You Want to Be a Data Analyst, Chapter 1: What You Need to Know If You Want to Work with Data and Are Not a Computer Scientist, Statistician, or Mathematician
A few years ago, I began the process of changing my career from marketing to data science. The company I was working for formed a sort of internal innovation lab to work on big data products; when I joined it, I stopped marketing enterprise reporting solutions for .NET developers and started marketing an email application that…
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