Things I'm currently doing

This is my “now” page¹. Last update: Mid-March 2024. [versión en español]

📓 Digital Humanities + Open Scholarship + Open Publishing

I’m an editor at Programming Historian. We publish multilingual peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of open computational tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. I’m also the Deputy Chair of ProgHist Ltd., the non-profit that administers Programming Historian activities.

📚 We recently publish a book chapter (led by Jennifer Isasi) about our open project: “A model for multilingual and multicultural digital scholarship methods publishing: the case of Programming Historian”. The chapter is part of the book “Multilingual Digital Humanities”, edited by Lorella Viola and Paul Spence for Routledge.
📄 With Anisa Hawes, Anna-Maria Sichani and Charlotte Chevrie we wrote the article []“Sustainable growth of multilingual open publishing projects: the case of Programming Historian”](https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/5571/) for the special issue on Multilingual Publishing & Scholarship of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

💾 Research Software

I’m a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow. As part of my fellowship, I’m developing resources and planning some training events to spread the word about Research Software Engineering (RSE) and reproducible research among people from the humanities (with a focus on Latin America). I’ve also been working on how to include Jupyter notebooks as part of the supplemental materials of Programming Historian tutorials in a way that is sustainable in the long run.

💻 Programming Communities

I’m part of R-Ladies' Global Leadership Team. 🌈 R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity in the R community.
- 💬 We recently gave a talk at posit::conf(2023) about the sustainable growth of a global community such as R-Ladies. We addressed the question: What happens if we apply good programming practices -such as modularity, refactoring and testing- in the managment of a community? The recording is now available.
I’m the co-founder and co-organizer of R-Ladies Santiago and R-Ladies Valparaíso.
- 📺 Check our Meetup pages and social media to learn about our next events.
I’m the co-founder and co-organizer of PyLadies Valparaíso 🌈 🐍.
- 📖 Since March we’ve been running a book club about “Research Software Engineering with Python: Building software that makes research possible”.
I’m one of the chairs of LatinR, the Latin American R Conference. This year the conference will be held online, between November 18 and 22.
I’m the maintainer of an R package called {datos}. 📦 The package translates on the fly the datasets used in the Spanish version of the book “R for Data Science”. I also maintain the Portuguese version of the package: {dados}
🐍 In May I attended PyCon US 2024 for the first time. I was part of the PyCon Charlas track, with a talk called "¡Pero si funciona en mi computadora! Cómo lograr que nuestros análisis de datos sean reproducibles". The talk is about how to make your data analysis work in others people’s computers.

🌱 Open Science

I’m a mentor at OLS, a mentoring & training program for Open Science ambassadors.
Last November I participated in Data Observatory’s Data Science conference with an invited talk about open and reproducible data science and research. The recording is now available.

🔧 Teaching

I teach the web scraping and the text mining modules (with Python & R) at the Data Science Specialization from the Faculty of Mathematics at Universidad Católica de Chile.
I am part of the academic committee of the new Professional Certification in Data Science at the Faculty of Economics and Administration of the Universidad de la República of Uruguay. I’ll be teaching the module about communicating results, reproducible reports, and automation.
I teach the R for data analysis and data visualization courses at the Master in Social Research and Development at Universidad de Concepción. Since this semester, I’m also teaching a new course called Using AI based tools for social research.
In January, I participated in the Mixed Methods Summer School organized by the Institute of Political Science of Universidad Católica de Chile. I ran a workshop about web scraping with R & working with archives. Details about 2025 edition comming soon 👀.
In January, I was also part of Datapalooza UC, a Data Science open event organized by the Faculty of Mathematics at Universidad Católica de Chile. I ran a workshop about web scraping with Python.

📚 Some linguistic research

I’m the co-investigator in a research project led by Soledad Aravena about lexical and syntactic complexity in school textbooks. We have a grant from the Chilean Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage 🏢 🎨. I am in charge of all things related to data management and research software. Python and R are our open tools of choice.

🐌 I’m finishing a PhD in Linguistics

Almost done ✨

If you want to know what my dissertation is about, here are two random pieces of audiovisual evidence:

Prehistory: my PhD topic started as a side project. 📊 Here is a talk I gave in Spanish in 2018 at the First Data Visualization Seminar (VISDatos), organized by the School of Design of Universidad Católica de Chile. Soon after this talk, I realized that it was a good idea to stick to this topic and to turn it into a Linguistics dissertation.
A couple of years later: ☁️ Here is a talk I gave in 2021 at the first edition of Outlier, the conference organized by the Data Visualization Society. Just some random thoughts about why wordclouds are useless for some topics.

Recently I have been talking about the challenges of building an open corpus of historical texts and on how to visualize it:

🍪 In April I gave a talk at Galletas con Té/ch, an event organized by the Digital History Lab of Universidad Católica de Chile. I shared some results from my dissertation.
💬 In July I presented my project at the Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2023) in Lancaster, UK.

To learn more about “now” pages: https://nownownow.com/about ↩︎