Script:

Today I’m talking about a small portfolio project I started recently, inspired by a love‑poetry anthology I bought a few months ago.

I originally picked up a few anthologies to help me wind down after finishing the romantic quadrant of my dragon poetry collection, which I’m currently editing.

One book that really stood out to me was Love’s Witness, an anthology of love poetry by women, edited by Jill Hollis.

It felt refreshing to read such a wide range of emotional experiences written from women’s perspectives. Growing up, I didn’t see much of that depth or nuance around me, so encountering it in this collection felt meaningful.

If I had one wish, it would be for a bit more global representation in the collection, but since the anthology was compiled in the pre‑internet era, I understand why the scope was more limited.

Since I’m working on building my data viz skills for a future career pivot, I thought it would be fun to use this anthology as the basis for a small portfolio project.

My first step was to extract some of my personal favourite poems and create an original dataset. I included things like the poet’s name, the poem title, their country, the theme, and a short note on why it resonated with me.

This turned out to be more work than I expected—which is becoming a familiar pattern at this point—but I’m excited for the next steps. I’ll be learning more SQL joins and experimenting with visualizations to highlight interesting patterns from the dataset.

It’s a small project on my poetry preferences, but it feels like a meaningful bridge between my creative life and my developing analytics skills.