Language development
Having kids finally makes requesting funds to do experiments on other people a thing of the past! For this project, I made a shiny app to track my first kid’s language development from month 12 to (probably) month 24. In the future, I will also track my second child’s development and integrate the data. This will likely cause me to rewrite the whole app and make it more general so that one just inputs a csv of words, their meaning and frequency and their first appearance and produces the same outputs. This could then also be a useful tool for citizen science projects where parents are “rewarded” with nice visualization of their kid’s development and linguists/psychologists can easily and cheaply collect large amounts of data.
Genealogical research
In order to further improved on my shiny skills, I started digitalizing my family tree and related documents in order to put it all together in a little app. The app uses social network tools to visualize the family tree, plots individuals birth place using Google Maps, shows the distribution of names in gender-specific word clouds, puts individuals life history in historical contexts and allows users to search the database with access to additional information and pictures in cloud repositories. Overall it covers the period from 1530 to today and over 600 individuals, growing with every visit to the local archives.