Profile

I currently work as a Data Scientist in Residence at the Barbican Centre, the National Theatre and English National Opera. In this job I analyse data in these arts organisations and design software which brings their data to life in interesting ways. My work more generally has always combined the arts and science. I started off at University being very unsatisfied with the analysis tools that were available to answer the questions I had, so I created my own tools. This led me to ways in which computer science and machine intelligence can be applied to the arts.

A typical day starts with a planning session with my fellow Data Scientist in Residence. We work in a way that is known in software development as Agile, which means every day we review our work, editing and adapting it as we go along. We then have a Skype call with our software development team who write the code for the software tools we are building. Some days we have meetings  and workshops with people in the different arts organisations, finding out about audience behaviour and repertoire. Other days we are working directly with different databases, querying them for data and then analysing them using statistics. Usually the data we get back needs tidying up before we analyse it, this is known as data wrangling and takes up a lot of time!