My first career after college was as the Data Manager for a nonprofit in Kentucky that provided services to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. As an overly ambitious 23-year-old, I was the inaugural holder of that title and…

Though the use of data for analysis is often framed as a way of answering questions about the world, it also helps us come up with new questions, questions more aligned to the mysteries that drive us to ask questions in the first place. We (Amanda and Cora)…

This semester, I’ve been working with two wonderful students doing mentored research projects of their own design. As they’ve been developing their research questions, I am reminded fondly of an exercise I did in a research methods class during grad school.   The professor, Dr. Ellen Goldring,…

As the new school year begins and our weeks are filled with slide edits, planning meetings, and the smell of new notebooks, one theme is dominating the preparation: Artificial Intelligence. I am not an AI expert. I have no tips…

In this post and a series of student contributions that follow, we describe a summer project where we engaged with students doing transcription work of historical archival documents. While the original conception of the project started off as purely oriented…

“It’s not ethical to use a dataset without spending time getting a very good understanding of what the data means.”  Heather Kraus When I started teaching an applied statistics class for undergraduates, I resolved to give my students as much…

Over my career as a student and professor, I (Amanda) have come to learn, with the help of my colleague Dr. Cora Wigger that understanding bias in research is essential to understanding causes and perpetuation of racism. In my first…