Projects

My projects find purpose through experimentation and play. Many start as small trials in the classroom or in my research: a question tested, a process refined, a method flexed. Some of these prove useful as tools or resources supporting deeper inquiry.

Recent Highlights

Data Visualization in R and Python

An open educational resource teaching data visualization principles through parallel code examples in ggplot2 and plotnine. (in progress)

Bilingual Bluesky Sentiment

Measuring sentiment and comparing qualities of Bluesky posts on Python and R.

Selected Open Source Work

tmtyro

Open source R package for working with and analyzing text for simple and complex features without needing deep familiarity in R.

stylo2gg

Open source R package for working with and preparing visualizations for stylometric analyses. Focuses reproducibility when making publication-ready figures.

Biblatex-MLA

Open source MLA style files for humanities users of LaTeX. First release in fall 2007; latest release on CTAN February 2022; development on GitHub.

Sample Shiny Apps

Real-Time Train Tracker on Raspberry Pi

Regularly updating gadget to track the arrival of trains at local CTA stations. Made using Shiny in R running on a Raspberry Pi with touch screen.

Movable Data Type

Shiny dashboard benchmarking read times for SQLite, MySQL, DuckDB, and Parquet (using Arrow), with an SQLite sandbox and options for visualizing.

Data Networker

Shiny dashboard to import, adjust, measure, and visualize network nodes and edges with ggplot2 and JavaScript, including options for export.

Older

Word Vector Utilities: R functions and code for working with Ben Schmidt’s indispensible wordVectors package to create models with reasonable defaults and using ggplot2 to explore the results. Code is documented in first and second blog posts.
19th- and 20th-Century Titles: A dataset of titles, years, and national origins for 13,334 novels. Data from Wikipedia. Last updated May 2019.
TopicKit: Simple interface in R to automate collecting online texts, preparing them, topic modelling them, and visualizing results. Begun July 2016; released November 2016.
Les indes galantes (The Gallant Indies): 939 KB; PDF; A translation into English of the prologue, first, second, and fourth acts of Louis Fuzelier’s 1735 French libretto to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera. Translated to use as source material in the classroom in fall 2011. First act added in fall 2013.
Digital Strunk: A remixed, reimagined, collaborative video edition of William Strunk’s 1918 text The Elements of Style. Created with students in my Freshman Composition 1 class in spring 2015.
Comey’s Testimony to Congress: Fully marked up TEI XML version of James Comey’s testimony on 8 June 2017, powered by TEIBP and JavaScript, with fun extra visualizations. Made during the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, June 2017.
Prologue, Les indes galantes: TEI-encoded version of the prologue of my translation, with extra functionality made available using JavaScript and CSS. Made during the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, June 2017
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, by Patrick Syme: TEI-encoded version of Syme’s 1821 edition of Werner’s useful guide to color. This effort is not yet finished.
Lawrence Durrell Online Critical Bibliography: 2,364 items in 06/12; communally updated; A Zotero database of the Critical Bibliography of the International Lawrence Durrell Society. Expanded upon the previous version of the bibliography maintained by James Gifford. First published in this format in spring 2012.