Hey, all. I am AJ and this is my blog about history, data, and learning more about both.
What is this?
Several years ago, I decided I wanted to start a data project that married my love of religious history with my love for data analysis. It began as a small spreadsheet for a class and has morphed into a data set of over 3,000 records detailing various important and unimportant facts surrounding Christianity in its first 5 centuries. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about R, SQL, and the early Christian church.
I do not have a formal programming background. When I went to get my certificate, I had to catch up in a lot of ways. Documentation is great, but it was often confusing, especially if I was trying to do an extra manipulation, or something more…weird or obscure. I relied then, and do now, on blogs and forums (like StackOverflow and Reddit) and their real-world examples to help me understand. I am not done learning, either. I hope that something posted here can help someone else in the same way!
Why this subject?
Interesting time. Interesting place. I wanted to explore the diversity of the earliest Christianities, and see what I could see in the people, places, and events of the ancient Mediterranean region during the 1st through 5th centuries. It turned out to be great practice for so many manipulation techniques I use in my day job.
Not sure if this will remain the sole subject, either! I am probably going to venture out into other subjects and/or engage in some side-quests at some point.
Professional/Educational background, very anonymized
- I work as a research associate for a team of research scientists at a tech company. I work in databases using SQL; and I do a lot of data manipulation, analysis, modeling, visualizing – all of it in R.
- I have a BA in religious studies, with a minor in history from an American university. I have a certificate in data science and visualization from another American university.
- I live and work in the US southwest.
Email: timestamped.blog@gmail.com