---
date: 1592820659
title: Foreword
---

::: {.epigraph}
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I
knew as well.
:::

As a preface to this blog, let me introduce myself: I'm a linguist
turned data scientist living in the Boston area. While a lot of my work
deals with natural language, I'm interested in the gamut of data and
what knowledge can be gleaned from it. I won't comment much on pop data
science or world events, but I hope that through reasoned analysis I can
provide clarity about what data I can get hold of.

I entered data science after leaving academia, but the transition wasn't
abrupt. I'd learned to code some years prior, and ran experiments as a
graduate student, punctiliously collecting small data sets, modeling
them in R, and encapsulating the results in manuscripts and slides. The
tools I use have changed (Python largely displacing R), and the data
sets are some orders of magnitude larger, but my work in graduate school
laid the flagstones for a data science career.

This blog will mainly comprise overviews of the data projects I'm
working on, essays on how I approach data, particularly language data,
and posts about how I use various tools---not just programming languages
and text editors, but also models and theorems. I hope not only to
showcase what insights can be loosed from a dataset (and what illusory
insights come of unsound analyses), but also serve as an aid and
reference to other data scientists---not least among whom, my future
self. A full portfolio of my work can be found on [my
homepage](https://alexklaphe.github.io/).