About

Who am I?

My name is Austin Wilkins. I love getting very serious about unimportant things, and taking a depth-first approach to every problem. I've spent the last few years working with researchers and advocacy groups on various data projects.

Experience

Academically, I hold a bachelors degree in Political Science. Along the way I met a few professors who needed help getting access to large quantities of data and processing it for their research (without alerting too much attention in the process), and managed to pick up a few publications. While working with the University of Arkansas Libraries as a data services specialist, I also completed the bulk of coursework for masters in Political Science and Statistics (discount classes and an extra stipend!).

I was pulled away from the university to work with ProQuest, an academic data company, as an in-house Text and Data Mining consultant. This involved supporting researchers to text mine large batches of licensed news documents, giving workshops on text mining techniques, and working with university libraries across the world to help them better support their researchers, all from the comfort of my home office).

Currently I'm working with the Jail Data Initiative, a project born of New York University's Public Safety Lab, managing their data pipeline and infrastructure.

Check out my now page for what I'm up to recently, or my personal page if you really want to get intimate.