Telling Stories with Data

A Data Science Portfolio Site for Samuel T. Shanks, PhD

If you are actually reading the Readme.md file for this GitHub repo, then you are likely something of a coding nerd. I am always looking to learn from my more experienced comrades, so if you would like to exchange wisdom, you can reach me via email quite easily.

A Few Disclaimers:

• This site is designed to be accessible to anyone with a curious mind and an interest in data. I am hoping to show off how I approach communicating data insights to non-data-junkies. If you want to see “how the sausage got made,” I have left links in the project-pages to the code I used (typically in the form of Jupyter notebooks) to clean, explore, and visualize the data
• I am a relentlessly curious person, and I live to learn new things. As a result, the work found here will always show a bit more breadth than depth. I can do depth; I have a PhD, but that is not want I am doing here. This is my sandbox where I get to play.
• This is a portfolio site, not a peer-reviewed journal. While I welcome emails from folks who notice errors, the primary purpose here is to demonstrate how I approach data science & data communication. I have not done extensive QA-work on the data itself. Re-use the data found here at your own risk.

How did I do this?

GitHub Pages sites are generated using Jekyll, which is a Ruby-based static-site generator. There are a number of open-source Jekyll themes out there, but this one is called What a Theme was developed by the smart folks at thedevslot.

I hit a few hiccups getting things rolling, but updating all of my dependencies seemed to allow the “http://localhost:4000/admin” feature to start working. This provides some GUI-based access to the site-building features, but it is pretty thin, and I mostly used it to help learn the system. Ultimately it is just as easy to write & edit the pages/posts/yml in VS-Code or R-Studio.