James Turk
Assistant Clinical Professor at Open States
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Turk is an engineer-educator with 23 years of experience building civic technology and data systems, currently an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded and led Open States for over a decade, architecting large-scale legislative data pipelines, managing volunteers, and operating production AWS environments. James combines hands-on backend Python/Django expertise—evident in sustained open-source contributions to projects like django-registration, jellyfish, and the widely used Open States scrapers—with leadership roles at organizations including PBS and the Sunlight Foundation. He mentors students in applied data science and runs real-world clinic projects, bridging academic teaching with production civic data work. Notably, his open-source maintenance often focuses on modernization and compatibility improvements, reflecting a pragmatic emphasis on long-term project health.
23 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology
English
Github Skills (16)
scrape10
scraper10
django-rest10
fuzzy-search10
scrapy10
json-api10
webscraper10
django-rest-framework10
webscraping10
python10
django10
data-processing10
screen-scraping10
data-scraping10
documentation9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
openstates/openstates-scrapers
Feb 2009 - Jan 2023
source for Open States scrapers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:45 reviews, 5772 commits, 732 PRs in 14 years
Contributions summary:James primarily contributes to the backend of the project, modifying Python scripts related to the Open States scrapers. The user is observed working on the bill and vote scrapers, with changes focused on enhancing functionality by updating data gathering processes, fixing issues with vote totals, and adapting to evolving website structures, and improving session retrieval. The user also demonstrates familiarity with Python and associated scraping technologies.
scraperpythongovernmentscrapers
jamesturk/jellyfish
Jul 2010 - Dec 2022
🪼 a python library for doing approximate and phonetic matching of strings.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:369 commits, 76 PRs, 317 pushes in 12 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James's commits primarily involved adding, modifying, and improving string similarity algorithms within the "jellyfish" Python library. The contributions include implementing and refining algorithms like Jaro-Winkler, and providing tests for them. The user also contributed to improvements for the NYSIIS algorithm.
python-librarystring-matchingpythonfuzzy-searchphonetic
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