I suppose this is my hello world post – I’ve never been good at getting my messages out there (I’m minimally active on social media, etc) but this is part of my attempt to rectify that a little. I have wanted to start a blog for a long time and in fact, I previously started one but failed to keep it going (hopefully this time it’ll be different!). I had called that one ‘Quietly Analysing’ which was mostly inspired from a quote by Ian Hacking in 1936.
The quiet statisticians have changed our world - not by discovering new facts or technical developments but by changing the ways we reason, experiment and form our opinions about it.
It’s still one of my favourite quotes about statistics but I won’t be continuing with that name as this will be more of a personal/professional website for myself. That blog no longer exists so this is effectively a new start for me. I intend to use this website as a place where I can refer others to my academic and analytical work/projects (e.g. at conferences and for current/future employers) but also as a place where I can write up things to aid my own learning and share with others. Occasionally I may write something personal. This point about writing is important as I’ve always felt that I need to get better at writing so hopefully just trying to do this more will help me improve.
As part of this, I am also hoping to contribute more as a member of the R community – a community that I have always found to be warm, friendly and welcoming. Since I am from Scotland I have to give a particular mention to EdinbR, who have been doing a great job of promoting R in Scotland (and I have to shamefully admit that I haven’t been able to be a part of as much as I wish).
I am still fairly new to using web tools so still count myself as a beginner in this area and I’m basically learning as I go. Therefore, I really have to acknowledge some people who have created amazing tools and resources that have helped me immensely in getting this website up and running. I am very grateful to Yihui Xie for creating blogdown (and so many other fantastic tools such as RMarkdown and bookdown) which I am using to create this website; to George Cushen for the Hugo Academic template; to Alison Presmanes Hill, Amber Thomas and Leslie Myint for their useful tips in setting up with blogdown and the Hugo Academic template.
