We all start somewhere.

This is true whether we’re referring to our lives, relationships, careers, hobbies, and even this website :)

In this inaugural post, I’d like to tell you a little bit about the motivation behind this blog. As a data scientist by trade I’ve started to see the world from quite a strange perspective, and it is this mental framework that I want to share with you through data-driven storytelling.

Through this framework, every phenomenon becomes a question that, in theory, can be answered by gathering, reshaping, and modeling data. With this kind of “datasmithery”, we can detect patterns (or noise disguised as patterns) that would otherwise be undetectable with human intuition alone.

“How do food deserts form in an urban context?”

“Can breakdancing be an effective way to teach kids about exercise?”

“How do non-profit humanitarian organizations share knowledge to inform their current and future efforts?”

“How will labor and capital evolve with the accelerating pace of intelligent automation?”

These kinds of questions are fascinating to me, and I’ve found that framing these questions in terms of data pipelines that can address a wide range of hypotheses is central to my field.

Instead of telling you what that process is like, I’d like to show you instead by sharing some stories with you!

-NB