| Julia Silge | |
| Birth Date: | June 10, 1978 |
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| Website: | juliasilge.com |
Julia Silge (born June 10, 1978) is an American data scientist and software engineer. She has developed tools for statistical modelling in the R programming language,[1] [2] including the text mining package tidytext.[3] Silge currently works for Posit PBC, formerly known as RStudio PBC.[1]
Silge studied physics at Texas A&M University, graduating in 2000. She obtained her M.A. (2002) and PhD (2005) in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin.[2] [4] She was an adjunct professor at University of New Haven and Quinnipiac University from 2006 to 2008.
Silge has worked as a data scientist for several companies, most recently Stack Overflow and Posit PBC.[1] [2] At Stack Overflow, she researched the popularity of different programming languages[5] and skills for technologists.[6] She also began working on tidytext, an R package for text mining, with colleague David Robinson. Their book Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach (2017) drew on examples of text analysis ranging from Jane Austen novels,[7] popular songs,[8] NASA metadata, and Twitter archives.[9]
In February 2017, Silge made the news when she used a note attached to a pizza delivery to contact her senator Orrin Hatch to object to the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, after failing to reach Hatch by phone.[10] [11]