This is my “now” page¹. Last update: Late October 2023. [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 Director of ProgHist Ltd., the non-profit that administers Programming Historian activities.

• We recently won the Best Training Materials category of the Digital Humanities Awards 2022 🎉 In 2021 we won the Open Content category of the Open Publishing Awards and in 2020 we won the Open Scholarship Award.
• Last year we wrote 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”. It will be published in December as part of the book “Multilingual Digital Humanities”, edited by Lorella Viola and Paul Spence for Routledge.
• With Anisa Hawes and Anna-Maria Sichani we are writting the article “Sustainable growth of multilingual open publishing projects: the case of Programming Historian” 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’m also exploring 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 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 will soon be 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 one of the chairs of LatinR, the Latin American R Conference. This year the conference was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, between October 18 and 20. I run a workshop about creating reproducible reports with Quarto.
• I maintain 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}
• I’m the co-founder and co-organizer of PyLadies Valparaíso 🌈 🐍.
• I recently gave a talk at PyCon Chile about creating reproducible reports using Quarto.

✨ I just completed the Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals course run by CSCCE, thanks to the support of CZI ✨

🌱 Open Science

• I’m a mentor at OLS, a mentoring & training program for Open Science ambassadors.
• In April I participated in the workshop “Accelerating Open Science in Latin America” organized by CZI in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• In November I’ll participate in Data Observatory’s Data Science conference with an invited talk about open and reproducible data science and research.

🔧 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. Materials from the web scraping with Python module are available in this repository and the ones from the R module in this other repository.
• In January 2024 I will participate in the Mixed Methods Summer School, organized by the Institute of Political Science of the Catholic University from Chile. Applications will be open between October 16 and November 24 👀.
• On the first half of the year I taught a short course about data management and visualization with R at the Master in Social Research and Development from Universidad de Concepción.

📚 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

Soon! ☕

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.

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