I am Professor of Sociology at Duke University. → More about me.  

Some of my Work

  • The Ordinal Society. Harvard University Press. » overview
  • Data Visualization. Princeton University Press. » overview
  • “Fuck Nuance.” Sociological Theory 35:118-127. » pdf
  • “Seeing Like a Market.” Socio-Economic Review, 15:9-29. » pdf
  • “The Performativity of Networks.” European Journal of Sociology, 56:175–205. » pdf
  • Last Best Gifts. University of Chicago Press. » overview

Recent Writing

Six to Ten Hours of Poly-Processing

16 April 2024

gssr is now two packages: gssr and gssrdoc

15 April 2024 Summary My gssr package is now two packages: gssr and gssrdoc. They’re also available as binary packages via R-Universe which means they will install much faster. The GSS is a big survey with a big codebook. Distributing it as an R package poses a few challenges. It’s too big for CRAN, of course, but that’s fine because CRAN is not a repository for datasets in any case. For some time, my gssr package has bundled the main data file, the panel datasets, and functions for getting the file for a particular year directly from NORC.   Continue reading…

Daily Average Sea Surface Temperature Animation

12 April 2024 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 it is: Here’s the static graph. Global mean sea surface temperature 1981-2024 And because the hardy perennial of whether, for the sake of honesty and not Lying With Graphs, you should always have your y-axis go to zero also came up, I made a zero-baseline version of the average temperature graph.   Continue reading…

The Eclipse via Satellite

9 April 2024 Yesterday’s eclipse as seen by the GOES-East weather satellite. I just grabbed the full-disk geocolor JPGs with wget and stitched them together with ffmpeg. BTW, If you’re wondering why the clouds remain in view as night falls to the East, it’s because the geocolor image is a composite of “true color” daytime and a Multispectral Infra-Red image for the night part. GEOS-East and West capture I think sixteen basic wavelength bands that can then be composited into various combination images.   Continue reading…

Make Your Own NOAA Sea Temperature Graph

4 April 2024 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 made available by the National Centers for Environmental Information, part of NOAA. As always, the sheer volume of high-quality data agencies like this make available to the public is astonishing.   Continue reading…