How do you apply data science to your projects?

'My PhD project is about whether the influence of language in the form of colour labels influences the visual perception of labelled colours, on the level of neural processing. This is an interdisciplinary project with Linguistics and Neuroscience whereby we apply data science in order to combine different types of data: MRI data, EEG data and behavioural, psycholinguistic data.'

Is there a project from this past year that you are most proud of? 

'I only started last year, so I am sure there is much to come,  but for my first year, I am proud of the data-focussed review paper I have written. The field of language and colour perception relevant to my project is popular, and there have been many experimental papers with a large variety of approaches. For my first paper I carried out a scoping review on almost 100 papers; I mapped the methodological approaches used in the past twenty years in these papers.

I will also publish my dataset and hope that my review will enable future researchers to take a data-centric approach in deciding what kind of experiments to conduct.'

What do you like most about being a DSC member?

'I really enjoy the diversity of people and the knowledge represented in members of the DSC. For example, for the review described above, I needed to find a simple way to be able to make my data available to other researcher, and I was inspired by the recent workshop offered by the DSC about shiny R apps to use such an app!

I also have had a lot of fun connecting with other community members during events like the Data Science Centre Away Day. I found that some research in completely different disciplines can still surprisingly have many useful similarities to my own research.'

What is your favourite data science method?

'I don’t have one particular method that I would call a favourite, but I do have a favourite goal: to find ways in which data science can help me and other researchers in my field do things that would otherwise not be possible in the field. For example, by creating innovative analysis methods of large amounts of data or texts. I enjoy helping colleagues who are less into data science themselves find solutions for their needs.'

Are you camp Python/R/or something else?

'Definitely R, simply because I know it the best, which enables me to be creative with it. I particularly enjoy making beautiful visualisations of data to tell a clear story, and I can spend a lot of time perfecting my plots in ggplot with increasingly more details.'

Contact Owen Kapelle about his work