Welcome back to the show! In this week’s episode, I chat with Christian Martinez, a faculty member at Brooklyn College and several other CUNY schools, and Shannon Joyce, a newly minted master’s graduate in psychological research—who, as we note at the top, literally graduated the day before we recorded. Christian shares how he redesigned his graduate stats and R course around NYC Open Data, building what he calls an “accidental author” process that transforms students’ weekly homework into portfolio books and, ultimately, chapters in a published student gallery. Shannon walks us through her own project exploring the relationship between mold complaints and domestic violence rates in New York City, and reflects on what it means to learn to code by asking questions you actually care about. We also dig into the NYC Open Data R package Christian and his students built together—now streamlined from 40 functions down to three and approaching 2,000 installs—and close with a lively conversation about whether open data skews too negative and what a truly positive city dataset might look like.
Resources
NYC Open Data Lab | NYC Open Data R Package | Shannon Joyce on GitHub
Guest Bio
Christian Martinez is a data scientist and educator. As an adjunct lecturer within CUNY, he teaches students how to use R, Quarto, and public data to investigate real-world questions and communicate their findings through reproducible research.
His work focuses on creating educational experiences that move beyond traditional classroom assignments by helping students produce public-facing, portfolio-ready projects. Through the NYC Open Data Lab, he develops open educational resources, open-source tools, and publishing opportunities that connect students with real-world data. This approach led to the creation of the NYC Open Data Student Gallery, a published collection of student research projects that use open data to explore issues affecting New York City communities.
In addition to developing resources that support data accessibility and reproducibility, Christian is passionate about empowering students to see themselves not just as learners, but as contributors to the broader data community. His work has been featured across civic technology, open data, and data science communities, and he regularly speaks on reproducible research, open education, and public-interest data.
Shannon Joyce is a recent graduate from Brooklyn College with a master’s in Psychological Research. Her research focuses on health and income inequity, combining psychology and sociology to understand how structural barriers shape individual mindsets, behaviors, and long-term well-being. As a member of the NYC Open Data Lab, she uses R to turn civic data into public insights through reproducible research methods. Shannon is dedicated to using data as a tool for social change.
Different Ways to Listen to the Show!
New Ways to Support the Show!
With more than 300 guests and 12 seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. If you’re interested in financially supporting the show, you can sign up for my Patreon platform, make a one-time payment via PayPal, or shop one of the show’s sponsors.
Transcript
00:01.72
Jon
Two fun new guests. Hi, Christian, Shannon. good to Good to meet you both. Thanks for coming on the show.
00:08.73
Christian Martinez
Thanks for having us.
00:10.46
Shannon Joyce
Yes, thank you.
00:11.67
Jon
ah Very excited. We’ve got a lot of ah open data, ah open source stuff to talk about, big projects, fun stuff. um Let’s start in the natural way. Let’s start with introductions so folks know who they’re going listening to today. um Christian, you want to start? and then And then Shannon, you can go.
00:29.21
Christian Martinez
Absolutely. Hello everyone. My name is Christian Martinez. I’m currently faculty a faculty member at Brooklyn College and a few other CUNY schools, which has been such a fun experience because I am a CUNY alumni myself.
00:43.51
Christian Martinez
And this this semester and the past semester, my students and I, our class did some amazing work with open data, specifically New york City open data, and I’m really excited to talk about it.
00:57.06
Jon
Awesome. Shannon?
00:58.84
Shannon Joyce
Hi, I’m Shannon. I just graduated from Brooklyn College with a master’s in psychological research. Still
01:05.69
Jon
But like, let’s let’s let’s caveat that for folks who are listening, because like that happened yesterday. So that’s very exciting.
01:12.27
Shannon Joyce
processing it.
01:13.72
Jon
So like, i’m i’m a little I’m not totally surprised, but that you’re like, you know, you’re up and awake and like not, maybe not super hungover, but that’s that’s awesome.
01:20.62
Christian Martinez
ah
01:22.90
Shannon Joyce
still still processing it
01:23.65
Jon
Congratulations. So process, that’s that’s great. Congratulations.
01:26.01
Christian Martinez
maybe tonight
01:27.32
Shannon Joyce
ah
01:27.38
Jon
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I interrupted.
01:32.09
Shannon Joyce
ah yeah oh no But yeah, so I just graduated, just starting the job search, and I’m just excited to start working on projects outside of school and ah you know delve into some more subjects that I’m more interested in.
01:33.22
Jon
Yeah.
01:48.99
Jon
Perfect. So I want hear more about your multiple skills that you sort of pieced together there. But let’s start with this project.
02:00.31
Jon
So maybe, k Christian, you can you sort of gave us a little bit of a glimpse, but maybe you can talk about the evolution of how you thought about teaching data and data viz and open data in class and then how you came to this uh you know this sort of open data platform where students would would publicly put all their ah their their projects
02:04.29
Shannon Joyce
Thank you.
02:20.28
Christian Martinez
Yeah, this is a great question. So I’m going to be as upfront as possible and say last semester was the first time I’ve ever taught at the graduate level. So I’ve been teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, one of the other CUNY schools since maybe spring of 2023. And I only taught undergraduates additionally in the psych program, but a totally different beast from this.
02:44.44
Christian Martinez
So when I started teaching and when I was creating my syllabus, I wanted to make sure that my students had something that they could be proud of. And more so that I’m brand new to the program.
02:58.94
Christian Martinez
I’m brand new at teaching at the graduate level. I don’t have as much to offer my students as some of my colleagues. For example, Shannon has a research advisor where she did her thesis.
03:11.56
Christian Martinez
Other colleagues have more traditional labs than myself. And I was thinking, okay, I don’t want my class to just be a class where students do homework and that’s it, where they just learn statistics or learn R and that’s it.
03:27.50
Christian Martinez
I wanted there to be something tangible. And so I thought of the idea of what if we take all of our research projects and turn them into a book?
03:39.28
Christian Martinez
I had never done anything like that before.
03:39.96
Jon
Mm-hmm.
03:42.34
Christian Martinez
I’d never been the author of anything. Sure, I created and and performed my thesis, but not in the more traditional sense of authoring a book. And so I sent a lot, a lot, a lot of emails to a lot of different people.
03:56.75
Christian Martinez
I ah then got to the Open Educational Resources Librarians at Brooklyn College. And I said, hey, I have this idea of taking my students final research projects and turning them all into individual chapters of a student gallery book.
04:17.06
Christian Martinez
What do you think? And here we came to our New York City Open Data student gallery book. And I mean, there’s a lot in between there, but that’s the origins of the of the project.
04:29.24
Jon
Yeah. OK, so Shannon, tell me how you, um well, let’s start with your core field of study. And then how did you come to this class? And then what was your immediate reaction to, OK, we’re not just going to be taking Blue Book exams or whatever people take now? I don’t know.
04:50.52
Jon
I mean, my kids are, you know high school. So like Google Chromebooks or whatever. um And then having stuff like out in the world. Cause I can imagine that like initially being like, I don’t want people to see my stuff.
05:03.01
Shannon Joyce
Definitely. So um the approach that I have taken to my research throughout this program has kind of been mixing psychology and sociology, just to see how macro and micro structures, um you know, ah interact with one another and and how they interact.
05:11.66
Christian Martinez
Thank you.
05:22.28
Jon
Mm-hmm.
05:24.50
Shannon Joyce
interact with ourselves. So, uh, so I was just kind of taking it from that angle. And, my final project for this class, um, I wanted to see how, uh, mold complaints in New York city correlated with domestic violence complaints in New York city.
05:41.47
Shannon Joyce
And not that, um, you know, they necessarily are related,
05:42.83
Christian Martinez
so
05:45.56
Shannon Joyce
ah to one another specifically specifically, but I wanted to see just how they trended together and kind of see what that tells us about those two variables and about so the interaction overall. So I don’t really know what to expect. I figured that they would be…
06:06.07
Shannon Joyce
I figured that they would be interacting in some way and that they would be correlating having the same trends. And they did. And I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. um
06:14.90
Jon
Yeah.
06:15.70
Shannon Joyce
But coming into this class, I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve never coded before. The only statistics that I had ever dealt with was a research statistics class in the year prior, which was
06:26.49
Christian Martinez
Thank you.
06:28.57
Shannon Joyce
you know, it was the exams and the typical homework assignments where it didn’t really relate to anything in real life, um at least in in my life and what I was interested in.
06:39.83
Shannon Joyce
So it was just learning the statistics, which was very helpful, but I i didn’t have that intrinsic motivation to ah ask questions and find out insights about, um you know, certain statistical questions.
06:55.14
Jon
Right.
06:55.26
Shannon Joyce
So, Coming into this class, first few classes was really just about learning the basics in RStudio.
06:59.62
Christian Martinez
Thank you.
07:04.15
Shannon Joyce
um Again, never coded before, so that was my first introduction to it. And i feel like it stuck pretty easily. And i feel like maybe a month in, it started to really take off into what projects can we create using NYC Open Data.
07:21.30
Shannon Joyce
um And I feel like that’s where the class really transformed for all of us in there, because we were able to dive into data sets that we were personally interested in, ask questions that we wanted to ask.
07:34.02
Shannon Joyce
And it wasn’t going off of a specific, you know, something that Christian was telling us to find out.
07:40.87
Christian Martinez
Thank you.
07:41.26
Shannon Joyce
We we were able to take it into our own hands and ask our own questions and kind of be creative with it.
07:48.34
Jon
Right. So OK, so this is the the r the teaching R part is really is really fascinating. um And I’ve spent, a few years ago, spent a lot of time like trying to learn R and thinking about how to teach R. So Christian, can you tell me a little bit about like the students that are coming in? So so I guess the real question is, like wheren like how many people how many students were like Shannon that like had never seen a coding language before? And how do you think about the difference when you’re teaching coding to like show students something, how to do something and then say, you know, you go do it for a while versus like, let’s write a line of code. And, you know, like, like, how do you, how do you approach teaching ah a coding language? because i think this is a, this is a big question. Obviously now with the AI tools is going to may change things, i but I’m curious how you approach this philosophy of teaching ah a coding language like, like R, but you know, it could be anything, i guess.
08:45.05
Christian Martinez
Fantastic question, and again, this is at the graduate level. And so I only had nine students, which is the smallest class I had, but that was great because I then knew that I had to spend even more attention to each individual student and we could be more of a collective and work together.
08:52.74
Jon
Yeah.
09:00.82
Christian Martinez
So when I’m developing the the class, the class was structured on a Tuesday, Thursday schedule. and my thought was okay let’s just do a drinking from the fire hose situation on tuesday where we do a code dump and i throw as much code as possible out there just to show you what is actually possible so it’s supposed to be overwhelming it’s supposed to be confusing but it’s supposed to just introduce you to what’s going on the thursday class is where where we really tie together because i say hey
09:35.45
Christian Martinez
Remember what we did on Tuesday? Let’s do a real world example of that today.
09:40.67
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
09:41.40
Christian Martinez
So I’ll give you an example. Let’s say we were doing a correlation and how to run correlations in R. That was on Tuesday. And in thursday on the Thursday class, we pretended like we were nba analysts.
09:55.02
Christian Martinez
And we were trying to see if there’s any relationship between the minutes played and points. So we’d start from scratch. Let’s open an R script. Let’s load our packages.
10:07.10
Christian Martinez
Here is the data that we have. And let’s work with it. And so at least from my opinion, I’d love to hear Shannon’s opinion as well. This was cool because on Tuesdays, you got to experience it and then you got to digest it.
10:20.00
Christian Martinez
And then Thursdays, it was like, oh, snap. like This is kind of how people are really doing these exact problems. If you were an MBA analyst, if you were working with the police commissioner, if you were doing any of the things that we were practicing,
10:27.73
Jon
Mm-hmm.
10:34.84
Christian Martinez
this is what This is how we be starting. This is how we be doing the things in the middle.
10:38.15
Jon
Mm-hmm.
10:39.58
Christian Martinez
And then this is how we be ending And then to tie it off, to keep everything a little coagulated, i had homeworks due every Monday.
10:42.37
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
10:48.41
Christian Martinez
So the following Monday, And so this way you had time, i had a similar prompt. And so this way you had time to look at what you did on Tuesdays, look at what we did on Thursdays, and then do it yourself on Mondays. And I thought that would be the best spacing because we are learning are the language, and it could be dense.
11:11.13
Christian Martinez
But then if you try to make it where, hey, like I’m not just teach you language to be perfunctory, I’m teaching it because this is what real people are doing and these are real scenarios that we’re practicing, then there’s a little more wealth.
11:24.76
Christian Martinez
And if I may go back to Shannon’s point, I have to say, and credit to her and her peers in that, they let me know very early on that the data sets we were using were boring.
11:25.20
Jon
Yeah.
11:33.72
Shannon Joyce
Thank you.
11:37.98
Jon
Yeah.
11:38.28
Christian Martinez
Boring, boring, boring. but But it’s so important, and like at the graduate level especially, and it’s one of the great things about having a smaller class is we can be a little more intimate. I’m happy that I at least created an environment where I wasn’t just saying, hey, you could talk to me about anything and no one says anything.
11:54.49
Jon
Yeah, for sure.
11:54.68
Christian Martinez
They were very straight up. And for example, I’m teaching base R, and I thought it was important, but teaching base R to show that R comes with preset data sets.
12:04.65
Jon
In
12:05.02
Christian Martinez
So one of the ones was MT cars, maybe the classic R data set. And I’m teaching empty cars, which is a data set about cars to people that live in New York city.
12:16.25
Jon
New York City, yeah.
12:16.54
Christian Martinez
None of my students have a car.
12:17.21
Shannon Joyce
Thank you.
12:17.82
Christian Martinez
like No one, no one knows what a cylinder is.
12:18.23
Jon
Right, right.
12:21.14
Christian Martinez
No one drives a car. Everyone uses the bus or train or walk. So there’s no connection to the data set.
12:25.02
Jon
Yeah.
12:26.86
Christian Martinez
And I had a a colleague of mine describe it as like, i’m I’m using cadaver data sets. They’re dull, they’re boring, they’re dead.
12:32.64
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
12:34.55
Christian Martinez
And so when one of her peers was like, Hey, Professor Martinez, like this sucks.
12:39.80
Jon
ah
12:39.75
Christian Martinez
i was like, okay.
12:41.53
Jon
ah
12:41.86
Christian Martinez
Let’s change it up. And that’s when I had the idea of really incorporating, not just waiting till the end, to the final project, but incorporating New york City Open Data into as many, if not all, of the weekly assignments and classes that we had.
12:48.41
Jon
yeah
12:56.34
Jon
Right.
12:57.14
Christian Martinez
And I think personally that’s when it changed the game.
13:00.12
Jon
Yeah. So i’m I’m curious on one thing. So I think my favorite book on R is Hadley Wickham’s R for Data Science book. And what’s interesting about Hadley’s book is that it starts with data viz.
13:07.92
Christian Martinez
Yeah.
13:12.00
Jon
It doesn’t start with analysis.
13:12.78
Christian Martinez
Yeah.
13:13.56
Jon
doesn’t start with you know calculations or regressions or correlations. It starts with data viz. and i think from a book perspective, I think that makes a lot of sense because it’s really easy in a tool like R to make something with just a couple of lines of code, you know, especially if you’re bringing in in empty cars or the, what is it?
13:31.35
Jon
The penguins data set, right?
13:32.18
Christian Martinez
yeah
13:32.67
Jon
Like really easy to build something, but it doesn’t sound like you started with the, with the data viz. And is that because um it’s just different in a, in a room when you’re, when you’re with students teaching rather than like a person working on their own with a, with a textbook?
13:50.04
Christian Martinez
So I would say that it’s not that I didn’t start with visualizations. I would say, and Shannon, you can correct me if you think I’m wrong, is that every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we started with visualization. So it’s not like we went, here’s how to visualize data, and here’s how to correlate data, and here’s how to this. It’s, hey, we’re working on, again, correlations, but how do we visualize the data first?
14:14.42
Jon
I see.
14:14.33
Christian Martinez
My biggest thing, and if it’s the only thing that my students take away, it’s that…
14:14.78
Jon
Okay.
14:19.34
Christian Martinez
visualize the data before you do anything else because i’m probably miscon mispronouncing it but it’s the akombe’s principle where you have the four different data sets they all look the same but they’re totally different when you visualize them so that’s something i brought up immediately and every single class i said hey
14:28.91
Jon
Yeah. Mm
14:35.29
Jon
hmm. Mm
14:40.65
Christian Martinez
We’re visualizing the data first. Hey, your homework’s due.
14:42.90
Jon
hmm.
14:43.96
Christian Martinez
I want to see visualizations first.
14:46.74
Jon
ahead
14:46.58
Christian Martinez
So kind of taking the same principles, which I think are incredibly important.
14:51.16
Jon
Yeah. um So Shannon, I want to i would take this in a little bit of a different direction because you can’t have a conversation these days without talking about AI. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about. it has AI has to be involved.
15:00.49
Shannon Joyce
Mm-hmm.
15:02.82
Jon
I’m curious because this is something I’ve been wrestling with in my head when teaching data viz is is you know how is AI changing the way in which I teach or the assignments I’m going to give? Did you and your and your classmates, did you use AI tools? I mean, I don’t know. I mean, at least the universities I teach in don’t have any rules yet about proper AI usage. So it’s like the wild, wild west. um Like, what was that? Like, did you try ai tools? Or was it just like, did you find it better, more worth your time to just like stay away from those and just really kind of solve the problem in in the code itself?
15:39.74
Shannon Joyce
Right, right.
15:39.61
Christian Martinez
Shannon, now that you graduated, you can tell the truth.
15:41.56
Jon
Yeah, now you graduate, you can say whatever you want.
15:41.98
Christian Martinez
It’s okay.
15:43.34
Shannon Joyce
ay
15:43.56
Jon
you you got You got the cap yesterday. You’re good.
15:46.30
Shannon Joyce
right right
15:46.33
Christian Martinez
yeah
15:47.32
Jon
Yeah.
15:47.77
Shannon Joyce
Well, I definitely feel like, you know, asking about my classmates, I feel like maybe all of us kind of used AI in different ways or maybe approach them in different ways.
15:57.66
Jon
Yeah.
15:59.83
Shannon Joyce
The only time that i usually used it is to understand errors because I noticed that if I tried to use that to learn how to code what I was just taught, I retained absolutely nothing.
16:12.70
Jon
Yeah.
16:12.73
Shannon Joyce
um And and it it wasn’t worth my time personally. um And I noticed that if i if I was using it to try to, um you know, come up with a model or or clean the data, I didn’t even know what it was doing necessarily. And actually it wasn’t even necessarily doing exactly what I wanted it to do, you know? So if I was going to use it, it was in a way where I am prompting it very specifically with what I’ve already done Um, and it was more so in a way to understand what I should be doing and not to have it do it for me.
16:49.27
Shannon Joyce
Um, so if I was having, ah if I was having trouble, like, you know,
16:49.50
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
16:55.54
Shannon Joyce
just aggregating the data in a certain way, or i wanted to visualize it in a certain way, i would maybe help have it help me in that way. But overall, and maybe this is just because of the way that R is structured, um i I prefer to build it myself because I know exactly which steps I took.
17:16.76
Shannon Joyce
When I need to backtrack, I know exactly which step to go back to.
17:17.33
Jon
the
17:21.02
Shannon Joyce
I feel a lot more connected to the whole code um when I’m doing it rather than, um you know, the steps told to me. And so I feel like i really i really didn’t use it all that much because it just didn’t serve much of a purpose for me personally.
17:31.09
Jon
Yeah.
17:40.47
Jon
Right, right.
17:41.34
Christian Martinez
I’m so proud.
17:44.12
Jon
Yeah, i mean, that that that um I think echoes my experience as well. Like when you have those like maybe weird errors or like it’s super, like you just can’t debug it.
17:56.04
Jon
like some some And sometimes the the AI tools still can’t get it right. um so So Christian, i want to I want to turn this back to you, like thinking ahead.
17:59.96
Shannon Joyce
Exactly.
18:04.16
Jon
How are you thinking about, i maybe this is more of a question for your undergrad classes, actually, because I would i would guess those are larger classes and and maybe students have more of a ah inclination to use the i AI tools to go faster.
18:19.51
Jon
But like, how are you thinking about potentially changing your approach to teaching coding skills in this new era where, you could conceivably just pop something into you know question into into Claude and say, write this for me.
18:34.94
Christian Martinez
Yeah, it’s a it’s it’s not something I’ve fully grasped yet.
18:39.67
Jon
Yeah, no.
18:39.48
Christian Martinez
I will say that i I don’t think I was shy about encouraging my students to use AI because of the fact that like,
18:40.31
Jon
Yeah.
18:46.42
Jon
in her
18:48.85
Christian Martinez
if you’re not using it in some capacity, now you’re slower than the rest. And my whole mantra was, hey, you’re about to graduate, I’m trying to prepare you as best as possible.
18:53.53
Jon
yeah
18:58.62
Christian Martinez
So if I just teach you how to code and not expect you use AI, when you get out of the my class and you get into the real world, you’re gonna be way behind.
18:59.44
Jon
Mm-hmm.
19:07.67
Christian Martinez
And so it’s not gonna be a skill.
19:07.94
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
19:09.88
Christian Martinez
I have tried to, when, creating my homeworks. I tried to make sure that they mimicked our Tuesday and Thursday classes as best as possible so that you would not have to use ai
19:27.13
Jon
and
19:26.94
Christian Martinez
Now, I have to admit that there were some times where, and and like there’s there’s two different categories, because like there’s the times where I could see a student use ai and I was like, all right, like I understand why they used it there or how it helped progress them.
19:41.91
Christian Martinez
And then there are other times where I’m like, what the hell did you write? like I’m not saying I’m the master. That’s not what I’m saying. But there was one time in particular where I’m thinking of, and a student wrote something that was so convoluted and so complex.
19:50.03
Jon
Yeah.
19:55.85
Christian Martinez
I was like, this is impossible that they wrote this. So there’s the it’s the catch-22 because it can be very helpful and push them to almost like what I think Shannon’s describing, like a ah better version of what Stack Overflow was, which is which is huge.
20:10.42
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent.
20:12.18
Shannon Joyce
it Yeah, exactly.
20:12.38
Jon
Yeah.
20:14.12
Shannon Joyce
It was almost like a more instantaneous or a more like individualized answer for what I needed in the moment.
20:18.59
Jon
Yeah.
20:20.16
Shannon Joyce
But I, I felt like the way that you had set up the the classes and the corresponding homework, there kind of was no need for it, you know?
20:32.91
Shannon Joyce
And actually a lot of the stuff I found on Stack Overflow.
20:32.76
Christian Martinez
Exactly.
20:35.91
Shannon Joyce
So it wasn’t even like I needed to necessarily use an AI tool to find that out. And again, I feel like I, I retained so much more of it when I didn’t just get a quick answer.
20:46.65
Shannon Joyce
i And ah kind of pushing back against your, you know, going into the, into the job market answer, part, part of,
20:47.19
Jon
Right.
20:57.78
Shannon Joyce
why I prefer to build it myself and kind of like make mistakes and, and go back. And I would spend hours on these homeworks and I don’t think this, these homeworks necessarily required hours to be on, but I learned so much just by trial and error. Um, and i use stacked overflow a ton. Um, and I feel like going into the job market, maybe, um Maybe that’s something hopefully that I can provide that because sometimes these AI tools, they might, um you know, they might answer the question that you’re looking for. They might do it very quickly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality is there and the, um,
21:39.16
Shannon Joyce
the attention to detail is there and even the creative ah approach to answering these questions.
21:40.89
Christian Martinez
Mm-hmm.
21:45.83
Shannon Joyce
And so I feel like by kind of straying away from it, but also using it as a tool when needed, um i feel like I was just able to, i feel like I was able to learn so much through using it in that way rather than, you know, going to it first.
22:03.43
Shannon Joyce
I feel like it was like my last effort rather than my first effort.
22:04.20
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
22:07.49
Shannon Joyce
Yeah.
22:08.12
Jon
No, I think that’s the the the right way to think about it. i ah Personally, i think The people who take the more of the approach that you took, which is let me learn this skill and use AI as that like supplemental tool is how you actually learn these things.
22:24.63
Shannon Joyce
Mm-hmm.
22:26.90
Jon
um the the the ai I mean, they are just tools. They’re not quite there yet. I mean, I’ve seen them make lots of error in the code that I haven’t tried to write. and um you know Yeah, I mean, I think it’s it’s ah it’s a harder piece, I think, from the instruction side of how to, I think, sort of great, you know you know, evaluate people’s projects when you’ve got someone spending hours and someone spending five minutes in a coding world where the answer, if it’s just a mathematical result,
23:00.54
Jon
I think that’s harder. But the thing about R and that we’re going to get to in a moment with these projects is that there is a visual component to them. And that’s where the creativity comes in. And that, at least for the moment, still the the human endeavor.
23:12.67
Jon
So, um which it’s you know, yeah.
23:13.13
Shannon Joyce
Mm-hmm.
23:13.94
Christian Martinez
If I may, I’ve said a joke probably too many too many times, but I always say R puts the R in artist.
23:23.83
Christian Martinez
And I know it’s a corny joke, but exactly that. I think so many people get maybe appropriately scared when they are introduced to any programming language, whether it’s R or something else. And it’s like, oh my God, this is crazy and this is technical.
23:36.82
Christian Martinez
But I really see it as an art form because Shannon versus any of my other students could all get to 100 on the homeworks and all have totally different code.
23:46.64
Jon
Mm-hmm.
23:46.52
Christian Martinez
And it’s not right or wrong. it’s It’s their way of speaking. It’s their way of displaying their art form. It’s their way of personalizing their own work. And that’s the beauty of it. And so another mantra i was trying to introduce is, hey, this is an art form.
24:02.55
Christian Martinez
have fun, do what you want to do and what comes to you. And I think also if you add that to the, what we’ve been talking about, then you’re like like a little more excited to write code yourself.
24:14.32
Jon
Mm-hmm.
24:14.97
Shannon Joyce
mm-hmm
24:15.22
Jon
Yeah, I wonder if the R package that’s artist would leave out the A or the I i don’t know.
24:20.14
Christian Martinez
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
24:20.76
Shannon Joyce
ah
24:21.11
Jon
You’d have to leave out something. um
24:22.39
Christian Martinez
yeah
24:23.60
Jon
OK, so let’s turn to the the final product, which is this this open library. So Christian, when you got to this idea and talked to the libraries, and I want to build this sort of like digital book of these projects.
24:42.62
Jon
Were you, was there any hesitation that like maybe the students wouldn’t want to do this or had you already sort of like crossed that bridge and the students were like, yeah, we’re on board. Let’s build something that like everybody, like it becomes a portfolio. like were Like what was the public, what was the sort of feeling for you about turning the coursework into a public project?
25:01.95
Shannon Joyce
Amen.
25:05.46
Christian Martinez
Okay. So can I answer that twofold?
25:08.18
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
25:09.53
Christian Martinez
So the first one is that I had mentioned, I believe that I mentioned that I wanted, once I got word that we could do this book and there was funding for it and grants it was possible,
25:23.86
Christian Martinez
I had the idea and I sent it to my students like, hey, this is our final project. It’s already available. You can start working on it, but I want to make turn this into a book. But if I may step back a little bit before, I actually started prepping my students on being authors, I would say from the first week.
25:34.42
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
25:43.66
Christian Martinez
So I had this accidental, what I call the accidental author process. idea and so and shannon may be able to attest to this so each week as i’ve mentioned you had homeworks right and i wanted to of course get as much of my students work out into the open because i don’t have a traditional lab and i wanted to get away from this one and done world in academia where you do a homework, you never see it again.
26:14.03
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
26:14.04
Christian Martinez
Maybe it lives in your downloads file folder. Maybe it lives in your documents.
26:17.42
Shannon Joyce
Thank you.
26:17.82
Christian Martinez
Maybe you already threw it out. A lot of times in academia and to no one’s fault, you do a homework and that’s it. So my thought was instead to turn all of their homeworks into their own portfolio book.
26:35.51
Christian Martinez
So what ends up happening is that their last homework assignment right before they have to do the final project is they have to take all of their homeworks and turn them into a quarto book.
26:46.69
Christian Martinez
So they each have their own portfolio. So it takes their homeworks from ah just a homework to, oh, man, like this is a portfolio piece that I could send to a recruiter, to a job, to this. And from a pedagogical standpoint, what happens is is that I double the amount of touch points that you have for each homework.
27:09.05
Christian Martinez
Because, okay, I did my homework from week one and week three, and that’s the only time I touch it.
27:09.30
Jon
Mm-hmm.
27:14.90
Christian Martinez
But now I have to put it into a portfolio book. I want to make sure that all the code looks good. i have to add an introduction, et cetera. So now that’s two times you’ve worked on the same homework.
27:26.71
Christian Martinez
And I’ve had this outstanding… rule that if you wanted to get points back on your homeworks at any time, you could work on them and resubmit them to me, which means that a maximum of three different touch points for each homework.
27:40.73
Christian Martinez
So even before we talked about this collaborative book, my students were already surprised to become their own authors and work on stuff themselves. And I was hoping that that would prep them for, okay,
27:54.82
Christian Martinez
I’ve worked on my own stuff that is a representation of me when we’re doing this New York City Open Data Student Gallery book of real research. Maybe that could push me even further.
28:07.51
Christian Martinez
So that was my my twofold goal of getting students to work out there.
28:13.18
Jon
and And so, and then it was at this point where you said, we’re not going to use empty cars, we’re not going to penguins. um We’re going to use the the New York City open data.
28:23.58
Jon
And was that like part of the requirement that students, I mean, there’s a lot of opportunities there. So it’s not like, you know, it’s not like there’s two things to look at, but like, was that one of the requirements that, and and we should also talk about the R package that you, that you both developed, but like, was that part part of the requirement of the of the final project, you have to be within this sort of New York City open data ecosystem.
28:43.37
Shannon Joyce
Thank you.
28:47.58
Christian Martinez
Yes. so So I had a lot of tricks up my sleeve all semester, maybe too many, but so
28:54.46
Jon
Future students but should be should be listening to this, right?
28:56.76
Christian Martinez
yeah yeah, so you’re absolutely right. I did not have, I did not come into this class thinking that we would create a book. That was something that I had that through all of this.
29:09.82
Christian Martinez
And I did not know that we’d be using open data throughout the entire class.
29:14.13
Jon
hmm.
29:14.01
Christian Martinez
What I did know is that the final project
29:14.27
Jon
hmm.
29:16.86
Christian Martinez
was going to mimic the requirements for New York City Open Data Week. So for anyone that’s not aware, New York City has the New York City Open Data Portal.
29:28.28
Christian Martinez
And then each year they host a conference, the New York City Open Data Week, where any anyone using data that’s related to New York City and open can present.
29:43.54
Christian Martinez
So we tie it back to, I don’t have a traditional lab. I don’t have like conferences that I traditionally go to, but what if all of my students as their final projects create research that uses New York City and open data, potentially New York City open data, but that wasn’t a hard requirement, just those two.
30:01.32
Shannon Joyce
Thank you.
30:03.93
Jon
Gotcha. Right.
30:04.82
Christian Martinez
And their final project can live outside of just the classroom and potentially be presented at New York City open data. Now, the individual my individual students did not end up presenting at New York City Open Data, but our book, which was funded by the OER librarians and by Brooklyn College in CUNY, we proposed to present at New York City Open Data Week this past March and were accepted.
30:32.77
Christian Martinez
So all of my students and I presented our our work, which was amazing.
30:36.95
Jon
Nice, nice. So collaborative presentation out of a collaborative project.
30:39.92
Christian Martinez
Exactly.
30:40.97
Shannon Joyce
Yeah.
30:41.75
Jon
um OK, Shannon, what how about this? Maybe you can tell us about your project. And then I think I want to i want to ask you both an outside the box question.
30:52.32
Jon
But can you tell us about like, I want to hear both about this mold domestic violence project and um and also not just the the data itself and your process, but also like what was the final thing that you created?
30:53.17
Christian Martinez
Cool.
31:09.43
Shannon Joyce
Yes. So um it all obviously happened in R. The final creation was at least when I had submitted it for class, which was the semester prior, it was an R markdown. So it was a lot of coding. It was a lot of cleaning and the the tests that I ran and visualization. So that was the format that it was uploaded as. And when we had um presented it in Open Data Week, we had turned it into, what was it, a Quarto presentation.
31:41.40
Christian Martinez
Yeah.
31:41.78
Jon
yeah
31:41.94
Shannon Joyce
So we all put it into a Quarto presentation.
31:41.88
Christian Martinez
hey
31:44.30
Shannon Joyce
So what was cool was it was all done within our studio down to the presentation format. um But so my project, looking at mold and domestic violence rates, I just wanted to see how they kind of co-occurred together, if they did, if they didn’t, what kind of trends were there. And unsurprisingly, they did trend together.
32:06.20
Shannon Joyce
There are lots of reasons why this could be. um Something that I found interesting was I was looking at resolution times. I wanted to see if the, I wanted to see the resolution times for mold complaints and if more or less resolution times correlated with more or less domestic violence rates.
32:25.55
Shannon Joyce
And interestingly enough, longer resolution times um were correlated with less domestic violence rates. And my takeaway from that was kind of
32:34.56
Jon
Mm-hmm.
32:36.79
Shannon Joyce
these people are probably, um you know, like pulling away from the system because they’re not seeing results when they report stuff. um So the project overall was interesting. It was a lot of cleaning because I, what i do and what I keep doing to myself is I love to take these big projects and then I’m like, yeah, it it should take me like, you know, maybe a week or something.
33:01.82
Shannon Joyce
I don’t know where, I don’t know why I do that, but then I’m up for hours just combing through and combing through.
33:04.34
Jon
Yeah.
33:08.71
Jon
Yeah.
33:08.98
Shannon Joyce
and that wasn’t the first time. And it was, it’s definitely not the last time.
33:13.02
Jon
We’ll be the last.
33:14.01
Shannon Joyce
um And I’m kind of going through it right now with another one. But, you know, you really… get to know the data. And at thought, because a lot of these data sets I’m looking over a period of years, they’re all different data sets per year.
33:28.92
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:31.08
Shannon Joyce
So now I’m working with like 15 different data sets at this point.
33:34.33
Jon
Yeah.
33:34.36
Shannon Joyce
And um I’m filtering within the open data portal before I even download it to my computer because the data sets are massive.
33:35.10
Jon
Yeah.
33:42.24
Shannon Joyce
um
33:42.78
Jon
Right.
33:43.99
Shannon Joyce
So it was just an interesting process altogether. i think if if I were to go back, I would have done a few things differently. i probably would have looked at rates rather than raw numbers because I feel like that kind of gives me a better insight.
33:50.20
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:54.09
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:56.65
Shannon Joyce
But the whole thing was a learning process. um And when it came down to kind of going back to the project and recreating it for Open Data Week because I submitted it back in December and Open Data Week was in March.
34:12.40
Shannon Joyce
So I kind of returned to it and I was looking at it and i’m like, why did I do it this way?
34:17.27
Jon
Oh, yeah.
34:17.29
Shannon Joyce
And now I can’t even recreate it.
34:17.88
Christian Martinez
a
34:19.13
Shannon Joyce
And and now now I’m going to present this.
34:19.51
Jon
Yeah.
34:21.33
Shannon Joyce
So it was just it was it was cool to go back a few months later even having learned more since then and seeing how much I’ve i’ve progressed since then.
34:28.87
Jon
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
34:31.33
Shannon Joyce
um But yeah, it it was just, ah it was cool to be able to kind of create my own thing just with the open world of the of the open data portal.
34:40.22
Jon
Mm-hmm.
34:42.71
Jon
Right. mayor Right, right, right. Before I turn to my out of the box question, i did I had a note. I want to make sure we talk about the R package. So you two and maybe others work together to build the NYC Open Data R package. Christian, maybe you can talk just for a couple minutes about about what that is.
35:01.30
Christian Martinez
Absolutely. So common theme, empty cars, penguins, a lot of the data sets that I was experimenting with, epic fail.
35:06.72
Shannon Joyce
Thank
35:10.14
Christian Martinez
My students are like, hey, I need something awesome and relevant.
35:10.48
Jon
Yeah.
35:13.69
Christian Martinez
And so we turn to New York City Open Data and all of a sudden we’re looking at slashing and stabbings and interesting things. And I tried to switch it up each week for a different topic and do totally different data sets.
35:26.68
Christian Martinez
so the problem is is that we’re pulling in new york city open data we have two options we can either download the excel files and put them into r which like structurally works and is an important skill to learn if you’re going into corporate world because you’re working with a ton of data sets
35:45.45
Jon
Mm-hmm.
35:45.34
Christian Martinez
But if you’re working in like a ah more programming setting, it’s not the best way to do it. Because number one, if you’re working with something like 311 data set, which changes every day, now you have to download and upload and your names get switched up and where is this and where is that.
36:05.11
Christian Martinez
And one of the beautiful things about New York City Open Data, the portal specifically, is it works with an API. So you can connect through API. But then… That would mean that I have to teach my students how to use r how to run statistics, how to visualize, how to story tell, how to create documents, how to create presentations, all the different skills within all of those, and then add how to use APIs, which is like an explosion of of information and really just too much for my students, in my opinion.
36:30.43
Jon
Yeah.
36:37.01
Shannon Joyce
And don’t worry, he did throw that in there.
36:36.86
Christian Martinez
Not that they couldn’t have.
36:38.77
Shannon Joyce
did learn how to do that. we did learn how to ah how to do that
36:44.44
Christian Martinez
So i was like, okay, like how do I not just absolutely lose all of my students, which I’m sure I was on the brink of many times. So I was like, you know what what the hell? Let me see if I can make an R package.
36:57.40
Christian Martinez
So it started with just the 311 open data set where it was like New York City underscore 311 and it would just call the New york City 311 data set. And then it turned into several functions where it each function would call a specific data set from the New York City open data portal.
37:16.76
Christian Martinez
And then I provided the opportunity for my students to become
37:23.32
Christian Martinez
creators of their own functions within a package. My thought was, hey, like we know R. Let’s see if we could take it to the next level. Here’s my code. You can remix it however you’d like to work for data sets on whichever you want.
37:38.73
Christian Martinez
Again, trying to maximize the creativity and level of creativity. So, hey, you like this data? Boom, work with this data. And that was regardless of whether you wanted to do it for your final project or for the package.
37:53.88
Christian Martinez
So then I think very cool, all of my students contributed one specific function to the package and they became, you know, junior software developers.
37:54.22
Jon
Mm-hmm.
38:05.20
Jon
Yeah.
38:05.51
Christian Martinez
Unfortunately, I’d say good and bad, unfortunately, all of their functions, including all of my original ones, are no longer part of the package.
38:05.92
Shannon Joyce
Bye.
38:14.36
Jon
Yeah.
38:14.71
Shannon Joyce
ah
38:15.00
Christian Martinez
hey Yeah, so I submitted it to our OpenSci and they’re one of the, if not the premier,
38:25.34
Christian Martinez
communities that try their best to make sure our packages are at their highest caliber. So I submitted it for peer review. They loved it. It has been approved by one and hopefully will be approved by the second one this week, but it was approved by two reviewers. But one of the things that they were saying was, hey,
38:44.92
Christian Martinez
you’ve got 40 different functions they all basically do the same thing like it’s really not the best way to handle this and they’re 100 right was it great for my students to get exposure and learn how package creating works and how functions work and how they can remix other people’s code 100 but from a an actual perspective it was just not
38:47.35
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
38:53.82
Jon
yeah
39:09.57
Christian Martinez
it was not maintainable. And if that meant that if there was a problem in one function, all the other ones had to be in, you know, and anyone that codes, copy and paste is ah is a nightmare.
39:19.93
Jon
Yeah.
39:20.18
Christian Martinez
So, but now it’s been downloaded or installed over 2000 times by over 2000 different people.
39:20.93
Jon
Yeah.
39:27.07
Jon
Wow.
39:26.88
Christian Martinez
It is about to be hopefully approved by our OpenSci. And I’m just really glad that it can help not only my students, but anyone that’s using R.
39:36.12
Jon
So that’s great. So so um did you then go back and like streamline the whole thing?
39:42.23
Christian Martinez
Yeah, so…
39:42.55
Jon
Like you had all these functions. So they said, you know this is great, but you know X, y and Z. So did you go through that and did you just streamlined the whole package?
39:50.90
Christian Martinez
Yeah, so I turned the 40 different, about 40 different functions into three. So the first one is, which is super impactful, is it’s a it pulls all the metadata about all the data sets on New York City Open Data Portals.
39:56.22
Jon
OK.
40:06.46
Christian Martinez
And there’s like, don’t quote me, maybe like 2,500, 2,000.
40:06.92
Jon
Mm-hmm.
40:10.72
Jon
Mm-hmm.
40:10.65
Christian Martinez
So there’s a lot. And that means you have access to all of them. Then the second one is You could take the ID that you get from the first one and just plug it in.
40:22.62
Christian Martinez
So now it’s just, Hey, what specific data set do you want to pull?
40:25.82
Jon
Right.
40:26.78
Christian Martinez
And then the third one is a, I would describe it as like fail safe. So you could take the actual JSON link, put it in just in case you can’t find it on the metadata or there’s something wrong, or you just want to do it your own way.
40:36.04
Jon
Yeah.
40:37.38
Christian Martinez
You could put your own JSON link and it works.
40:38.20
Jon
Gotcha.
40:39.65
Christian Martinez
So 40 to three is, is huge.
40:42.30
Jon
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely an efficiency gain. OK, I want to ask you a a little outside the box question here. And I’m going to give credit to this question to um Jason Forrest from Data Vandals, who was on the show a few weeks ago. And and he and I were talking yesterday. we happened to be talking about ah New York City open data as part of our conversation. And and he made a comment.
41:03.90
Jon
um that the data in the New York City open data, as i would I would venture to say most open data, city level open data platforms tend to be pretty negative, right?
41:15.38
Jon
It’s mold, it’s domestic violence, it’s ah it’s probably it’s a lot of 311, 911 calls, right?
41:17.73
Shannon Joyce
Thank
41:23.78
Jon
Which tend to be kind of on the negative side. And I’m curious, and I haven’t gone through all the projects, but I’ve seen bunch of those that are sort of in that similar vein. And I’m curious, whether you think there should be a place in these open data sets for stuff that’s like more positive. And I don’t know what that is necessarily. I mean, obviously the one that comes to mind is like, you have a survey of people saying how great New York city is or how great their train station is whatever. But I’m curious if, and i know I know I’m throwing this at you like last second, but I’m curious about how you, what you think about that, of having this data set that is 2,500 different series that,
42:00.54
Jon
tend to be kind of negative things when there’s a lot of positive stuff that we could get in data.
42:07.11
Christian Martinez
Shannon?
42:07.59
Jon
don’t know, Shannon, if you want to go first.
42:08.83
Shannon Joyce
I actually, yeah, so um
42:09.01
Christian Martinez
Yeah.
42:11.64
Shannon Joyce
i love the idea of positive, ah you know, data sets in open data and whether or not what’s on there already is negative, maybe more neutral, but the insights might be negative.
42:18.35
Jon
Yeah.
42:25.83
Shannon Joyce
Or the the hard thing about it is, and correct me if I’m wrong, Christian, because you’re closer to that community.
42:26.55
Jon
Mm-hmm.
42:32.58
Shannon Joyce
But I believe that most of these data sets do come from city agencies. So the data that they’re, or the data sets that they’re putting in there are, um you know, stuff that they’ve collected for their own missions and and for their own reasons.
42:45.63
Christian Martinez
Thank you.
42:47.82
Jon
Yeah.
42:48.94
Shannon Joyce
And so I think it just makes it hard to, it just makes it hard to, get that other, get those ah more positive data sets for a reason that would be for agencies, if that makes sense.
43:05.28
Shannon Joyce
Like, I feel like the agencies would need a positive reason to have that.
43:05.82
Jon
Yeah.
43:08.88
Shannon Joyce
But with that being said, I do love the work that data vandals does because they get to engage with the community and they do get to get these, um these opinions.
43:08.95
Jon
Yeah.
43:19.87
Shannon Joyce
And ah a lot of them are very positive or just um they’re, they’re just, ah the They’re different than what you usually would get with open data because it’s a little bit more qualitative.
43:31.29
Jon
Yeah.
43:34.07
Jon
Yeah.
43:34.46
Shannon Joyce
um and And just getting to talk to real people on the street. I would be interested to see how something like that can be worked into the open data system. I’m just not sure how, given that it mostly comes from the agencies, if that makes sense.
43:50.07
Jon
Yeah, I agree. ah Christian, I will give you a so ah a chance. I mean, I think i think negative is…
43:53.34
Christian Martinez
Yeah, no rush.
43:55.95
Jon
um Negative is a hard, is maybe a harsh word because, you know, we want people to report domestic violence incidents, right? So you don’t want there to be domestic violence, but when there is, you do want people to report it. um You know,
44:12.09
Jon
is having reports of the potholes being fixed, like that i get that’s a positive thing, right? And you want to have that information that the potholes are being fixed. um But i think I think to your point, and and I think what Jason was was getting in our and conversation, is like there are a lot of great things happening, um and they’re not always collected.
44:33.91
Jon
um And yeah, I don’t know how to collect them, certainly at scale. I think that’s ah that’s ah that’s another hard thing to do. But I think your point about like, these are agency mission driven data sets.
44:45.42
Jon
And so there’s probably not the New York city happiness agency, although that would be a lot of fun, right? Like they’re not going out giving balloons, everybody, but yeah.
44:52.50
Shannon Joyce
And, and right.
44:54.73
Christian Martinez
ah
44:54.93
Shannon Joyce
And, and it also might be that the way that we are engaging with the data is we’re looking for, so for issues and and not sounding like, oh, we’re looking for issues, but, but we’re, we’re looking for a problem that needs to be fixed.
44:55.27
Jon
Yeah.
45:03.02
Jon
Yeah.
45:07.67
Shannon Joyce
We’re trying to find data on what’s going wrong so that we can figure out how to make it right.
45:08.40
Jon
Yeah.
45:12.55
Shannon Joyce
um
45:12.97
Jon
Right.
45:13.66
Shannon Joyce
But a project that I just, well, recently have been working on and Christian’s been helping me out with it is, um, looking to see how speed cameras have improved ah crash-related injuries over time.
45:25.17
Jon
Right.
45:25.38
Shannon Joyce
And it it is, the i like, you know, maybe it’s not the most engaging thing data set, but it is, that is a positive, or, you know, that’s an improvement in infrastructure.
45:36.79
Jon
Yeah.
45:39.27
Shannon Joyce
And so I think it might just be the way that we are analyzing and engaging with the data.
45:44.73
Jon
e
45:45.03
Shannon Joyce
It’s a lot easier to find what’s wrong ah in whatever sector you’re looking in.
45:48.63
Jon
Yeah.
45:51.09
Shannon Joyce
But depending on the question that you ask, you can also probably find a lot of good, you know?
45:51.38
Jon
Yeah.
45:56.31
Jon
he Yeah. k Christian, i’ll let you I’ll let you take us out. like let me let me Let me rephrase it a little bit. um if maybe you could get, if you had unlimited supply, unlimited funds, unlimited time, what positive data set would you like to collect from your fellow New York City folks?
46:21.57
Christian Martinez
All right. Imagine that you just asked me this question off the fly. I would love to see the amount of friends made when moving to New York City.
46:26.06
Jon
Yeah.
46:34.03
Jon
Oh, yeah.
46:34.71
Christian Martinez
I think that would be a cool one. Something with like time spent with other people because i think that…
46:40.57
Jon
e
46:43.86
Christian Martinez
I’ve been to all 50 states, which I think is super cool. And there is still no city like New York.
46:47.94
Jon
That’s cool.
46:50.18
Christian Martinez
And there’s always something to do. And as long as you are yourself in New York City, I personally feel New York City will accept you. like It doesn’t matter how niche you are, as long as you are yourself.
47:01.40
Christian Martinez
And so I think there’s such a beautiful community inside. If there was a way to measure how much or how intertwined a person was, either on a normal scale or when they like become a New Yorker and they no longer are Taurus and moved in, I think that would be cool.
47:20.23
Christian Martinez
That’s my, that’s my hot take.
47:20.54
Jon
Yeah. I like it. I like that hot take. Yeah. I like that i like the way to, I like ending on a positive note. ah that’s that’s ah That’s a good one. That would that would be fun. um OK. Let me just round out. um Christian, where can people find the data lab, and where can they find the R package?
47:40.73
Christian Martinez
Yeah, so all of the amazing work that myself and my absolutely great students that are so hireable and you should definitely hire, especially Shannon, all of yeah all of the
47:52.54
Jon
Good one. Good luck.
47:53.53
Shannon Joyce
Yes, please.
47:55.73
Christian Martinez
all of the work can be found on the New York City Open Data Lab dot org. And so that includes the R packages that we created because we turned the New York City one and did it for Chicago, LA.
48:10.51
Christian Martinez
We’re working on Austin and we’re working on another one. So there are a few different cities that we’ve done, especially in New York city. The,
48:20.54
Christian Martinez
The book, the New York City Open Data Gallery book that we all created is on there. Additionally, I created like a meta book of all of my individual students portfolio books can be found on there.
48:31.95
Jon
Mm-hmm.
48:34.09
Christian Martinez
Shannon is currently working on an amazing analysis of the relationship between the increase in speed cameras. and motor vehicle crashes, specifically death-related crashes, which she’s working on, which can also be found on the lab, New York City Open Data Lab.org.
48:47.10
Jon
he
48:52.82
Christian Martinez
So that’s the place to be. Try to create one ecosystem, not only for all the work that I’m doing, but all the work that my students are doing and have done.
49:00.44
Jon
Awesome. And Shannon, in addition to the part of the the lab that has your project, where can, and I’m going to be explicit about this, where can potential employers find you?
49:12.92
Shannon Joyce
Well, they can find me at, me let me pull it up, but it’s my my GitHub username is Shannon Joyce.
49:19.54
Jon
There you go
49:20.50
Shannon Joyce
Yeah, github.com slash Shannon Joyce. So they can find me there.
49:23.32
Jon
Okay.
49:24.46
Shannon Joyce
They can find me on LinkedIn. um
49:26.22
Jon
Perfect.
49:27.61
Shannon Joyce
if they If they search me, they can find me.
49:29.72
Jon
Okay, sounds good. The way of 2026, easy to find.
49:32.54
Shannon Joyce
Exactly.
49:33.27
Jon
All right, Christian, Shannon, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is ah this has been a lot of fun.
49:37.57
Christian Martinez
Thanks.
49:37.75
Shannon Joyce
Thanks for having us.