How to work with us!
Complex Stories is about broadening the audience of scientific research with whimsical and interactive data stories, while showcasing best software practices to ensure sustainability of research software. We are deeply inspired and grateful to the folks at The Pudding for their work in the open.
Who am I?
- Jonathan St-Onge holds a Ph.D. in Complex Systems and Data Science from the University of Vermont, where he was a VERSO PhD Fellow. His thesis on theoretical models of groups in network science was completed under Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne's supervision as a member of the Joint-lab. With roots in the humanities, he brings an interdisciplinary perspective to complex systems research.
- As a research software engineer, he helps research groups accelerate and strengthen their computational capabilities by promoting best software practices in academia, including:
- Writing sustainable code that can outlive its original author — reducing technical debt and enabling long-term research continuity.
- Packaging software that is adequately tested, increasing its epistemic reliability and reproducibility.
- Promoting community practices that bridge industry standards with academic workflows — improving team collaboration, onboarding, and project management.
- With his experience in academia, he can help writing grants, collaborate across disciplines, and support diverse teams — especially those new to coding or computational tools.
"1-2" months projects
We can write code to help you accomplish specific research tasks — fast. These are short, high-impact collaborations that can be funded through fee-for-service mechanisms or grants.
- Projects with clear, established goals, where the path to delivery is well defined.
- We have prior experience with similar open-source tools, so we can deliver quickly and reliably, ceteris paribus.
- The data is familiar territory — data you already collected and understand, making the collaboration efficient and low-risk.
- Typical outcomes include interactive dashboards, what we call interactive press releases and other storytelling components of all kinds that help share key findings with the broader public or stakeholders.
"6" months projects
We collaborate to build reusable software components and infrastructure tailored to your research workflows — helping your group to better work together while ensuring sustainability.
- You might have a project inspired by others' work that needs new data collection or deployment of online platforms with interactive features.
- We work on developing novel methods to conduct participatory surveys, combining expertise from interactive story telling with qualitative data collection. We have experience sharing and communicating sensitive data while respecting the privacy of individual data.
- We leverage existing digital infrastructure we've built at VERSO — like research virtual machine and APIs — to avoid reinventing the wheel and accelerate development.
Longer-term partnerships
These are deep collaborations where we anticipate complexity and co-create innovative research tools. While the future is hard to predict, we help you stay on course and avoid costly pitfalls.
- Tailored projects that explore new approaches — such as integrating a front-end data interface with a back-end API and database for custom data collection.
- We build robust and secure infrastructure that supports your research not just today, but for years to come — designed with long-term maintenance in mind.
- We offer mentorship in modern software practices, helping your team learn approaches from industry that are rarely taught in academia — improving onboarding, team coordination, and future grant competitiveness.
Our community
We're not alone, we bring expertise from all over the place.
Project illustration by Scriberia. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: The Turing Way Community & Scriberia (2024).