Jonathan Jayes

I'm a data scientist at Nexer Insight. Before that I spent four years on a PhD in economic history at Lund University, looking at how electrification shaped careers and labour markets in early twentieth-century Sweden.

The thread running through both is text as data. Biographical dictionaries, census returns, company reports and patent records all hold answers, if you can get them out of the PDF and into a table. These days that usually means a language model, a schema and a lot of checking.

I grew up in South Africa and studied economics at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University before moving to Sweden.

“I enjoy some of the old and I enjoy the new. And if I can find a balance between it, that's where I find my satisfaction.”