Collect, analyze, visualize
I am a self-taught programmer who is most comfortable analyzing and visualizing data in R and Pajek or coding in PHP and MySQL. I can collect data using Python and the Beautiful Soup library. After learning HTML and CSS reading an O'Reilly book when I was 14, I favour open-source software and open formats for greater sustainability and accessibility.

Databases
Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860
- MySQL relational database;
- Over 40 tables;
- Structure documented in an article;
- PHP 7.4 hardcoded website.
Upcoming work
I will build a mediagraphy of George W. M. Reynolds's works and speeches with Stephen Basdeo.

Photo by Pietro Jeng on Unsplash
Linked Open Data and Wikidata
I did a one-week course on Linked Open Data at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in 2017. Three years later, I wrote about its limitations with four other participants at the “Exploring the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata Workshop”.
In 2021, I found that Wikidata was the solution I was looking for to allow “boutique” projects to link up their data without having to rely on the URIs of inaccurate and uneditable authority files.

Quantitative Data
I've analyzed polling data, election results, and organizational data first for political parties and eventually for the general public through the elections blog I co-founded, Primed for the Polls.
I've also analyzed 11,000 poll responses, including 4 open-ended questions, as part of public consultations regarding a public transportation project in Québec City.
Qualitative Data
As part of public consultations regarding a public transportation project in Québec City, I've analyzed:
- 143 memoranda;
- 4 open-ended questions with over 11,000 responses.
As part of an iterative approach in designing an analysis grid to assess the positions expressed in the memoranda, I encoded six memoranda using the RQDA package.
See Appendix 4 for methodology.

Textual Data
I encoded three novels in TEI and used the <seg>
tag to encode which paragraph in each of two English translations corresponded to which paragraph of the French source text.

Data Visualization
I've created Sankey diagrams, sociograms, maps, and timelines to understand situations past and present.

Reference Management
I've been using Zotero for over 10 years.
- Consulting
- Designing classification system for the material you use in your reports;
- Training your team to use Zotero and your custom classification system.
- Coaching
- Leading virtual workshops to teach the basics of Zotero or its more advanced features.