After many years of procrastination and saying that I will start a blog, I finally have the free time and the willpower to start one in 2023. The genesis of the name of this blog comes from an annual tradition where at least one person makes a joke about how they need me to “clara-fy” something. This is because my name is Clara.
You can learn a bit about me in the “About” section of this website, but I will also expound a bit more below.
Clara with a lot of books
I am Clara! I studied government and public policy with a focus on political methods and survey research, China, and foreign policy. I am particularly interested in authoritarian regimes, or post-communist countries like the ones that comprise the former Yugoslavia. Additionally, I enjoy reading about and researching misinformation, propaganda and censorship, information control, and media in general. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on media and information control in contemporary China, and I conducted research on misinformation as an undergraduate research assistant for Professor Brendan Nyhan.
I am also very interested in tech policy and ethics, and I like thinking about how technology is impacting society and disrupting social contracts. I spent a summer researching applications of differential privacy as part of the Privacy Tools Project at Harvard University, and thus I have a particular interest in data privacy and security.
After college, I spent time working as a data scientist for political campaigns. Although I studied the governments of other countries, I am also quite keen on American politics and who gets to run my country of citizenship. In 2019, I started a Master’s program at Peking University as part of the Yenching Academy program. Sadly, after just four months my time in Beijing was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I then spent some time bouncing around internships and jobs to explore my different interests and passions. I worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution in their China center, I worked on the analytics team for the Biden campaign, and then I spent about a year building data products at the now-defunct tech media start-up, Protocol. There is more information about what I did at Protocol here.
I learned that I love writing code and making data visualizations, I love reading about and discussing current affairs and public policy, and I love learning new things.
This blog will hopefully be an outlet where I can do some of these things that I love. I plan to blog about China, US politics (maybe), and do some fun analyses with publicly available data sets. I also plan to write about data science and programming in R, as well as share some helpful tips and tricks for data science that I’ve learned along the way. I am making this blog using Quarto, and I made a Docker container to help keep my development environment stable, even as my machine is ravaged by the chaos of my poor Anaconda installation.