Grant Witness: An R-Powered Research and Advocacy Enterprise w/ Noam Ross- nyhackr October Meetup

Visit https://www.nyhackr.org to learn more and follow https://x.com/nyhackr Talk Title- Grant Witness: An R-Powered Research and Advocacy Enterprise Talk Description- Grant Witness is an organization tracking the changes in federal science and health funding under the Trump administration. At the heart of our project is a team collaborating via a modern R stack for web scraping, data warehousing, analysis, modeling and publishing. This stack produces an authoritative, dollar by dollar and contract by contract database and a steady drumbeat of analyses highlighting the government's unlawful actions. Grant Witness data has been shown in Congressional hearings, cited by federal judges, and used to power advocacy campaigns, inform plaintiff recruitment, and support court filings. Our work appears in over 500 news articles. I will show the data tools our team has stood up to produce trustworthy data and reproducible research that responds to government at the speed of advocacy and journalism. Bio- Noam Ross is co-founder of Grant Witness, a nonprofit project tracking government funding terminations and policy. He also serves as director of rOpenSci, where he has spent a decade leading R package peer review. He is a researcher studying and forecasting emerging infectious diseases, and advises on statistical and computational methods for predicting outbreaks.