Welcome

Maximise the Impact of your Expertise

Hello! I’m Cara, an Edinburgh-based Data Consultant with a background in academia. I specialise in data visualisation and “enhanced” reproducible outputs. I’d love to help you make the most of your data. Here’s how:

• Crafting intuitive and compelling data visualisations to help your end users engage well with the key patterns in your data
• Building solutions to automate data-to-visualisation processes, freeing up your time for the work that needs your expertise
• Providing you with a dataviz design system, so that you can effortlessly create polished plots and presentation documents with a consistent style that reflects your project
• Training, mentoring and ad hoc consultations to help you build confidence in your own data visualisation work

This website features a portfolio of my publicly available work and a blog about my adventures in #rstats, dataviz and datascience.

If you like what you see, get in touch!

hello @ cararthompson.com

Here are some of things I get up to

Throughout my work, my goal is to create tools that help both experts and end users interact well with the data available to them.

Datavisualisation and Data-Driven Story Telling

A good graph can be a great shortcut to helping people make sense of complex data. I enjoy exploring patterns, drawing out key information, and finding creative ways of making the story behind the data resonate with its audience. My portfolio comprises a range of visualisations including static graphs, animated graphs and interactive graphs in a variety of styles. The one consistent thing is the clarity of the message! …

Data Pipelines and Parameterised Reports

Who wants to spend their time copy-pasting things to and from a convoluted spreadsheet in order to get from the data to the final product? I find a huge amount of satisfaction in creating solutions for clients that allow them to go straight from the data to their desired output (polished dataviz, summary of analyses, complex write-ups with conditional text), so that they can spend more time focusing on their domain of expertise.

I have 10 years experience building parameterised reports to analyse data from postgraduate medical examinations, providing detailed reports to examination bodies and individualised feedback reports to candidates and examiners. As you can imagine, most of these are not publicly available, but if you want to find out more about the process, give me a shout!

Shiny Apps and R Packages

Helping others make sense of their own data is a particular passion of mine. To do this, I have enjoyed creating Shiny Apps with a lay audience in mind. From text analysis to visualising uncertainty, the aim is to help others make informed decisions based on their own data. …

Generative Art

I also dabble in the fascinating world of Generative Art. I created the aRtfulBot primarily as an exercise in automating code outputs with APIs and containers. Setting up a bot that automatically creates a new piece of generative art each day seemed like the most fun way to explore all that! …