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I’ve gotten a couple of reports from people having trouble installing the socviz library that’s meant to be used with Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. As best as I can tell, the difficulties are being caused by GitHub’s rate limits. The symptom is that, after installing the ... [Read more...]

A few years ago I wrote a post about the stickiness of college and university rankings in the United States. It’s been doing the rounds again, so I thought I’d revisit it and redraw a few of the graphs I made then. In 1911, Kendric Babcock made an effort ... [Read more...]

I was asked for some examples of posters I’ve made using R and ggplot. Here are four. Some of these are done from start to finish in R, others involved some post-processing in Illustrator, usually to adjust some typographical elements or add text in a sidebar. I’ve linked ... [Read more...]

I am stuck at home sick today, so I decided to provide a relational analysis of the Stats Package Wars that have been bubbling away for the past week. True in all its details. If you want something slightly more constructive, consider The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social ... [Read more...]

Chapter 2 of Data Visualization walks you through setting up an R Project, and takes advantage of R Studio’s support for RMarkdown templates. That is, once you’ve created your project in R Studio, can choose File __ New File __ R Markdown, like this: Select R Markdown … And then choose “From ... [Read more...]

Based on the heatmaps I drew earlier this month, I made a poster of two centuries of data on mortality rates in France for males and females. It turned out reasonably well, I think. I will probably get it blown up to a nice large size and put it up ... [Read more...]

Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction will begin shipping next week. I’ve written an R package that contains datasets, functions, and a course packet to go along with the book. The socviz package contains about twenty five datasets and a number of utility and convenience functions. The datasets range in ... [Read more...]

I taught my Data Visualization seminar in Philadelphia this past Friday and Saturday. It covers most of the content of my book, including a unit on making maps. The examples in the book are from the United States. But what about other places? Two of the participants were from Canada, ... [Read more...]

As part of the run-up to the release of Data Visualization (out in about ten days! Currently 30% off on Amazon!), I’ve been playing with graphing different kinds of data. One great source of rich time-series data is mortality.org, which hosts a collection of standardized demographic data for a ... [Read more...]

Here’s a feature of dplyr that occasionally bites me (most recently while making these graphs). It’s about to change mostly for the better, but is also likely to bite me again in the future. If you want to follow along there’s a GitHub repo with the necessary ... [Read more...]

Since the U.S. midterm elections I’ve been playing around with some Congressional Quarterly data about the composition of the House and Senate since 1945. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to share the data, but here are two or three things I had to do with it that you might ... [Read more...]

Earlier this year my colleague Steve Vaisey was converting code in some course notes from Stata to R. He asked me a question about tidily converting from long to wide format when you have multiple value columns. This is a little more awkward than it should be, and I’ve ... [Read more...]

To close out what has become demography week, I combined the US monthly birth data with data for England and Wales (from the same ONS source as before), so that I could look at the trends together. The monthly England and Wales data I have to hand runs from 1938 to 1991. ... [Read more...]

Amateur demography week continues around here. Today we are looking at the population of England and Wales since 1961, courtesy of some data from the UK Office of National Statistics. We have data on population counts by age (in nice, detailed, yearly increments) broken down by sex. We’re going to ... [Read more...]

Yesterday I came across Aaron Penne’s collection of very nice data visualizations, one of which was of monthly births in the United States since 1933. He made a tiled heatmap of the data, taking care when calculating the average rate to correct for the varying number of days in different ... [Read more...]

On Twitter the other day, Philip Cohen put up some data on changes in Bachelor’s degrees awarded between 1995 and 2015. The data come from the National Center for Education Statistics. It seemed like a good candidate for drawing as a figure, so I had a go at it: Changes in ... [Read more...]