Briefly Front-line House Democrats Ideologies in the 116th Focusing on Democrats Summary Briefly A quick look at the voting behavior of the 30 House Democrats that represent congressional districts carried by Trump in 2016 – relative to other House members. Using Rvoteview. For a more in-depth account of the characteristics of front-line House ...

Thoughts initial Data sets Modeling political ideology in the 116th House A final thought References Thoughts initial A brief (and copycat) go at modeling roll call voting behavior in the US House of Representatives using (1) constituency demographics, (2) house member party affiliation, and (3) house member characteristics. This post is based directly ...

Introduction A super simple post that summarizes R-based methods for visual summary & collage-building using image attachments on Twitter. In the process, a bit of a photo homage to Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small in her first year representing New Mexico’s 2nd district.

if (!require("pacman")) install.packages("pacman")
pacman::p_load(tidyverse, rtweet, tigris) 
options(tigris_use_cache = TRUE, tigris_class = "sf")

New Mexico’s 2nd District The 2nd ...

House & presidential election returns Trump margins in 2016 Flipped House Districts from 2016 to 2018 The 31 House Democrats in Trump-supportive districts A quick geographical perspective The 13 House Democrats in solid Trump districts Voting patterns in presidential elections Voting patterns for the 31 Trump-House Dem districts The 5 House Democrats that should probably vote against impeachment ...

New Mexico demographics via tidycensus 2016 Presidential Election Presidential elections in New Mexico historically New Mexico as bellwether? Congressional delegation historically New Mexico State Government Summary In this post, we piece together a brief political history of New Mexico using a host of data sources, including Wikipedia, the US Census, the ...

A very brief introduction Some open source data sets Extracting referring expressions to 45 Party-level stance towards 45 House Rep stance & 2016 presidential vote margins Prevalence of 45 reference Summary References In this post, we investigate how (& how often) members of the 116th House of Representatives refer to the 45th president of the United ...

Google n-gram data Nearest-neighbors Procrustes, PCA & visualizing semantic change Detecting semantic change Summary References I have developed a Git Hub guide that demonstrates a simple workflow for sampling Google n-gram data and building historical word embeddings with the aim of investigating lexical semantic change. Here, we build on this workflow, ...

A brief intro to nmelectiondatr CD NM-02: an overview A look at Pearce-Xochitl precincts Straight- & split-ticket voting in NM-02 Summary In this post, we consider some different precinct-level perspectives on Xochitl Torres Small’s surprising win over Yvette Herrell in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District (NM-02) in the 2018 general ...

Building a historical, genre-based corpus Building a Naive Bayes classifier Model assessment & confusion matrix Summary In this short post, we outline a Naive Bayes (NB) approach to genre-based text classification. First, we introduce & describe a corpus derived from Google News’ RSS feed, which includes source and genre information. We then ...

Congressional data sources Scraping tweets via rtweet Twitter followers & political ideology Shared tweets as ideology Summary Postscript: News media ideologies Resources In this post, we consider some fairly recent studies conducted by folks at the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center that investigate the relationship between political ideology — as ...

Ideal points estimation Legislators in political space Legislation in 2D political space Political space and marijuana A quick geographical perspective Political ideology in NMSL53 Summary References This is the second in a series of posts investigating voting patterns in New Mexico’s 53rd State Legislature (NMSL53). In this post, we ...

Package descriptives NMSL53: an overview Attendance & party loyalty Health care-related roll calls Roll call details Incorporating census data Summary Postscript: Vizualizing congressional composition In this post, we introduce a new R data package, nmlegisdatr, that makes available roll call data for New Mexico’s 53rd (2017-18) State Legislature (NMSL53). While ...

Concreteness ratings and the lexvarsdatr package Context & concreteness scores Geographical distance FIN References This post considers a super-clever study presented in Snefjella and Kuperman (2015), in which the authors investigate the relationship between psychological distance and geographical distance using geolocated tweets. General idea/hypothesis: The more we perceive an event/entity ...

Some preliminaries Socio-economic profiles Age distribution profiles Summary This post demonstrates a simple workflow for building census-based, historical socio-demographic profiles using the R package tidycensus. The goal is to outline a reproducible method for quick visual exploration of trend data made available via the American Community Survey (ACS). We focus ...

From text to map Corpus search and context LSA, MDS, and semantic space FIN In this post, we demonstrate some different methodologies for exploring the geographical information found in text. First, we address some of the practical issues of extracting places/place-names from an annotated corpus, and demonstrate how to (1) ...

Synchronic application Diachronic application Topic clusters quick summary References This post outlines a fairly simple workflow from annotated corpus to topic model, with a focus on the exploratory utility of topic models. We first consider some text structures relevant to topic modeling in R, and then demonstrate some approaches to ...

Language data and the census Languages in the US Linguistic diversity as entropy Locating linguistic diversity FIN This post investigates linguistic diversity in the United States utilizing data made available by the US Census. We consider census language classifications, and introduce a simple methodology for quantifying linguistic diversity using entropy ...

Defining potential keyphrases Corpus search for potential keyphrases Selecting descriptive keyphrases with the tf-idf statisitic Post script - State of the Union Addresses This post outlines a simple framework for identifying and extracting keyphrases from component texts of a corpus. We first consider some functional characteristics of descriptive keyphrases, as ...

Search syntax Corpus search Search summary KWIC & BOW Summary and shiny This post demonstrates the use of a simple collection of functions from my R-package corpuslingr. Functions streamline two sets of corpus linguistics tasks: annotated corpus search of grammatical constructions and complex lexical patterns in context, and detailed summary and ...

Census nuts/bolts New Mexico & the US Some macro-exploration A simple model Some final notes References In this post we investigate Spanish language maintenance within Hispanic communities in the US utilizing data from the US Census. Spanish language maintenance refers to the rate at which Hispanics within a given community ...