Most public data goes unused — not because nobody cares, but because the people who could act on it rarely have the methods to work with it. I have spent part of my career standing in that gap: scoping the question a partner actually needs answered, cleaning and joining the data, and delivering a result they can use without me. Delivery is the step that decides whether any of it helps.
Civic & Applied Data
As Data Consultant at the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI; Northeastern & Harvard), May 2023–February 2025, I helped civic partners put the City of Boston’s open data to use — community organizers, the City itself, the Boston Children’s Museum. Alongside the consultations, I maintained data pipelines and interactive ArcGIS maps, and mentored students from high school to master’s level on data management and analysis. (The community-building side is under Service.)
Two published examples of that infrastructure work, both on the BARI Dataverse:
- Geographical Infrastructure for the City of Boston v.2023 — with Dave Hatten, Michael Zoorob, Alina Ristea, Saina Sheini, and Daniel T. O’Brien. A database organizing and linking the places of Boston across 17 nested levels, from land parcels and streets to census geographies and administrative regions.
- 2020 Census Geographies — with Daniel T. O’Brien. The City of Boston’s 2020 census geographies, prepared for research use.
Research Datasets
Datasets built in the course of my research. The COVID-19 collection has a dedicated page.
- COVID-19 Twitter Database — Turkish Sample (with B. Özturan) — Zenodo, 2020. Turkish-language Twitter activity from the pandemic’s first year.
More research datasets will appear here as the papers they belong to are published.