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Late last month, I analyzed results from Utah’s Republican and Democratic caucuses to show how the different presidential candidates fared across Utah. That was fun work to do, but I realized there was one more map I wanted to make; I want to compare the Republican and Democratic voter ... [Read more...]

Just kidding; it was amazing. Last week, I traveled to San Francisco to participate in an unconference/hackathon organized and hosted by ROpenSci. This was my first R conference or meeting, and it was a such a great experience. I am still feeling a bit at a loss for words ... [Read more...]

Well, it’s been an interesting election season so far, right? Everybody holding up OK? Utah held its caucuses this past Tuesday on March 22 and I thought I would do a bit of plotting to show the results. We can get the JSON data from CNN, as pointed out by ... [Read more...]

In my last post, I did some natural language processing and sentiment analysis for Jane Austen’s most well-known novel, Pride and Prejudice. It was just so much fun that I wanted to extend some of that work and compare across her body of writing. I decided to make an ... [Read more...]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that sentiment analysis is super fun, and Pride and Prejudice is probably my very favorite book in all of literature, so let’s do some Jane Austen natural language processing. Project Gutenberg makes e-texts available for many, many books, including Pride and Prejudice which ... [Read more...]

I have always loved learning and thinking about names, how they are chosen and used, and how people feel about their names and the names around them. We had a traditional baby name book at our house when I was growing up (you know, lists of names with meanings), and ... [Read more...]

I saw this analysis at Flowing Data about the most common consumer products involved in hospital ER visits and was delighted, interested, etc. Nathan’s next related post is, um, also super interesting, if entirely horrifying. Apparently, I am not the only one who thought this data set was compelling, ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I used water consumption data from Utah’s Open Data Catalog to explore what kind of users consume the most water in my home here in Salt Lake City, what the annual pattern of water use is, and how the drought of the past few years ... [Read more...]

I have been working with a data set on causes of death in my adopted home state of Utah for a little while now, and I had been struggling with the best way to visualize it. This week, David Robinson released the gganimate package to create animated ggplot2 plots and ... [Read more...]

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I have my second guest post up today at Ari Lamstein’s blog where I conclude my exploration of the Religious Congregations and Membership Study at the ARDA. In this post I show how we can look at the relationships between a data set like the religion census and demographic ... [Read more...]

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I have a guest post up today at Ari Lamstein’s blog where I show some more fun things that can be done with the Religious Congregations and Membership Study at the ARDA that I used to look at Utah. I looked in some detail at Iowa ahead of their ... [Read more...]

I live in Utah, an extremely dry state. Like much of the western United States, Utah is experiencing water stress from increasing demand, episodes of drought, and conflict over water rights. At the same time, Utahns use a lot of water per capita compared to residents of other states. According ... [Read more...]

The state of Utah (my adopted home) has an Open Data Catalog with lots of interesting data sets, including a collection of health care indicators from 2014 for the 29 counties in Utah. The observations for each county include measurements such as the infant mortality rate, the percent of people who don’... [Read more...]

My family and I moved to Utah about 5 years ago and we have found ourselves thoroughly in love in with our new home state. I didn’t know much about it before we began the process of contemplating a move here, and I find that is often true of many ... [Read more...]

In my previous blog post, I analyzed my Twitter archive and explored some aspects of my tweeting behavior. When do I tweet, how much do retweet people, do I use hashtags? These are examples of one kind of question, but what about the actual verbal content of my tweets, the ... [Read more...]

I started learning the statistical programming language R this past summer, and discovering Hadley Wickham’s data visualization package ggplot2 has been a joy and a revelation. When I think back to how I made all the plots for my astronomy dissertation in the early 2000s (COUGH SUPERMONGO COUGH), I ... [Read more...]