Your Phone and Watch have a lot of data about you. I mean, like, a lot. Someone should really write a book all about the general issues for society that this raises. Yesterday I decided I wanted to take a look specifically at the health data on my iPho... [Read more...]

This post summarizes an extended period of deep annoyance. I have tried to solve the problem it describes more than once before and not quite done it. This has, in fact, happened again. I have still not satisfactorily solved the problem. But this time I know why I can’t ... [Read more...]

This week in Modern Plain Text Computing we put together some of the things we’ve been learning about cleaning and tidying data. Here’s a somewhat sobering example using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which is how the NTSA tracks information about road accidents in the United ... [Read more...]

The other week, the Internet’s most beloved creepy snowman wrote a blog post where he showed how to use a little Python to group states by their number of electoral college votes to make a table like this: Electors States PopPct ECPct 3 AK, DE, DC, ND, SD, VT, WY 1.61% 3.90% 4 ... [Read more...]

I’m about to start work on a second edition of my Data Visualization book. As a result I continue to mess around with stuff I’m considering including in a new edition. The other day I pulled some block-level Census data and drew a map of th... [Read more...]

I was messing around with some Census data this morning. I had two main thoughts. One was to show the utility of old-fashioned grayscale when it comes to mapping data (or displaying it in general). The goal of most carefully thought-through dataviz col... [Read more...]

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Yesterday evening I gave a talk about data visualization to Periodic Tables, a Science Cafe run by Misha Angrist. It was a lot of fun! Amongst other things, I made an animation of the NOAA Daily Sea Surface Temperature Graph from the other week. Here i... [Read more...]

Sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic have been in the news recently as they continue to break records. While there are already a number of excellent summaries and graphs of the data, I thought I’d have a go at making some myself. The starting point is the detailed data ... [Read more...]

NORC released version 2a of the 1972-2022 General Social Survey cumulative file. I’ve updated {gssr}, an R package that makes it more convenient for R users to work with GSS Data. One handy feature of {gssr} is that it lets you see documentation for individual GSS variables as R ... [Read more...]

Some Lissajous animations for Pi Day. Made with R, ggplot, and gganimate. And the really not very efficient code that made them: r 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 ... [Read more...]

I was writing some examples for next semester’s dataviz class and shared one of them—a Dorling Cartogram—on the socials medias. Some people don’t like cartograms, some people do like cartograms; in conclusion, we live in a world... [Read more...]

The General Social Survey, or GSS, is one of the cornerstones of US public opinion research and one of the most-analyzed datasets in Sociology. My colleague Steve Vaisey aptly describes it as the Hubble Space Telescope of American social science. It is... [Read more...]

{{flipbookr}} is an R package written by Gina Reynolds. It’s very useful for teaching. It was developed for use with .Rmd files Xaringan and presently does not work with Quarto. I hacked-up a version of Flipbookr that does work with Quarto. Using it with Xaringan should be exactly the ... [Read more...]

The Naming of Stats is a difficult matter,      It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a stat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all are the names where usage is informal,      ... [Read more...]

While we’re redoing some classics, here is the time series of assault deaths in the United States and eighteen other OECD countries from 1960 to 2020. Assault deaths in the OECD, 1960-2020. Code and data are available... [Read more...]

The visualization exercise of the day for class is a re-creation of a figure I first saw Lane Kenworthy make. It’s a connected scatterplot of total health spending in real terms and life expectancy of the population as a whole. The fact that real... [Read more...]

Sometimes data arrives as a series of individual files each of which is organized in the same way—which is to say, each of which has the same variables, features, or columns. Imagine a series of tables reporting mandated information about every s... [Read more...]

The Broadberry et al GDP series has estimates of England’s real GDP and population from the year 1270 onwards. It’s available, along with a lot of other long-run data, from The Bank of England. Here’s an animation of the series. I som... [Read more...]

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” runs the opening sentence of Anna Karenina. Hadley Wickham echoes the sentiment in a somewhat different context: “Tidy datasets are all alike, but every messy dataset is messy in its own way”. Data analysis is mostly ... [Read more...]