Christmas carols: multi-lingual, with chords - created using the same Data tools as those used for tracking Canadian vital statistics
My Christmas present to you all. Plus some important moments from this year
As many of you guessed, data science is not only my profession, but also a passion and a hobby - helping people to see and appreciate Open Data using the tools that I can develop. Last year one of such tools that I helped to develop was Open Canada Vital Statistics tracker, which is available at https://open-canada.github.io/Apps/vitals (also at https://o-canada.shinyapps.io/vitals/ and aliased at www.ivim.ca/vitals), which visualizes and tracks Vital Statistics (Deaths and Births) published monthly by Statistics Canada. The best part of such Apps is that once they are built they can run forever (as long as Statistics Canada continues publishing such data) and thus be useful even for many years from now. [ This is what happened with Border Wait Time tracking App that I built four years and that is still listed among most popular in open.canada.ca portal (Do Google “border wait time open canada data app” and it will likely come as the first result). ] And these Apps can be easily reused and extended by anyone skilled in data science coding, as source code for them are made publicly available on GitHub.
Another big hobby of mine, as some of you also know, is playing guitar and writing songs (I have this habit since childhood to express my feelings in music and wrote about hundred of songs covering my years living in Moscow, Kyiv, Edmonton and Ottawa). This year, I did something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. - With the help of my friend in Kharkiv, Ukraine (and who is still there - under the constant threat of being attacked by a Russian rocket and accustomed to losing electricity any time of the day), I have delivered some of my songs and music on Spotify, Apple Music and other popular music playing platforms.
And then there’s another hobby of mine, which is learning different languages and doing translations, especially of poetry and songs. Some of these are on lyricstranslate.com and bookdown.org/gorodnichy/jobim.
And so, four years ago ( 2 BC, as some say, i.e. Before Covid) I did something, where all of these three hobbies got combined - I developed this:
Christmas carols: multi-lingual, with chords, analyzed using Data Science
https://rpubs.com/ivim/noel (https://gorodnichy.github.io/noel)
There I collected English and French Christmas carols that I knew and that many of us love to sings during holiday seasons, found the guitar chords for them, and then built the songbook - using the same data analysis and publication techniques that I was learning for building my Web Applications.
And this is my present to all of you - Happy holidays! Have great time! Learn to play guitar, learn other languages, learn understand each other, learn to face toughest obstacles, remain true to your inner light, appreciate what other people are giving you and find the ways to give back. I witnessed so much of it this year, like never before.
PS
And so to end this Special Christmas post, I invite you to go back to the post I made last month about a woman, who came to the Ottawa People Commission to tell her version of the “Freedom Convoy” story, which seems like was not the one they wanted to hear. This post has been updated with the video of her presentation - in original language (in French) at official OPC YouTube channel, and then it has been also uploaded to Rumble with English subtitles so that more people can appreciate and share it. Enjoy watching, while learning French (or English) and some true Canadian spirit.
