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· 3 min read

As the year is almost over, it's time to review my one and only resolution that I've been sticking to for the past four years: the Goodreads Reading Challenge. For 2019 I set quite a reasonable goal of reading 24 books, an average of two per month.

To combine my love for literature and data analysis, I've created a dataset with key information about the books I've read this year and visualized it in an interactive dashboard with Google Data Studio.

· 5 min read

Web scraping is a method of automatically gathering data from websites in a structured manner and storing it into a local database or spreadsheet. Why would you do this? Because you're lazy. Or because it's really impossible to copy-paste all the data you need from the website.

Some popular use-cases of web scraping are price comparison sites of products from different companies, lead generation from collected contact information, trend analysis of popular topics in a certain location. I simply wanted to see what are the most popular movies of 2018 and what features they have.

· 4 min read

Goodreads is an amazing platform for tracking and organizing your reading, discovering new books, and sharing reviews or recommandations with friends.

On my quest to becoming a data scientist, I've recently played with my goodreads data to get some insights into my reading habits in the past six years. You can have a look in the GitHub repo at the full dataset and basic analysis with Python. For a quick and colorful overview, I create two interactive dashboards: one in Google Data Studio and one in Tableau.

· One min read

Wednesday marked the first day of the last summer month and I celebrated by presenting a poster at the 5th Linguistics Meetup Berlin-Potsdam, hosted at the Potsdam University.

Whereas last year I gave a talk about semantic dementia, this year I contributed with a poster about my ongoing Master's dissertation on Romanian psych-verbs.

Update: You can read more about the research method and data analysis of this project in this blog post.

· 5 min read

Last Saturday 18th November I attended again the Autumn Meeting of Patholinguistics in Potsdam, in a wonderful new location Am Neuen Palais. The theme of this edition was "Diagnosis and treatment of dysphonia" (also known as hoarseness), a condition of the vocal chords or the larynx which makes the voice sound breathy, strained, raspy, or lower in volume or pitch.

· 2 min read

Today I attended the long-awaited international fair for languages and cultures ExpoLingua in Berlin. It's a must event for anyone interested in language learning and teaching, because for two days (17-18 November) it brings 150+ exhibitors (language schools, travel operators, cultural institutes, publishing houses, translators, associations) from 30+ countries and offers workshops, presentations, crash-courses in different languages, performances, and moderated panel discussions, from five categories: languages and cultures, presentations for teachers, learn & travel, tests, and career.