Silge has worked as a data scientist for several companies, most recently Stack Overflow and Posit PBC.[1][2] At Stack Overflow, she researched the popularity of different programming languages[5] and skills for technologists.[6] She also began working on tidytext, an R package for text mining, with colleague David Robinson. Their book Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach (2017) drew on examples of text analysis ranging from Jane Austen novels,[7] popular songs,[8]NASA metadata, and Twitter archives.[9]
In February 2017, Silge made the news when she used a note attached to a pizza delivery to contact her senator Orrin Hatch to object to the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, after failing to reach Hatch by phone.[10][11]