R

Tue, Apr 10, 2018

Visualizing the Baby Boom

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. I thought combining the monthly tiled heatmap and the LOESS decomposition would work well as a poster, so I made one.

Sun, Apr 8, 2018

Animated Population Pyramids in R

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 tidy the data, make a pyramid for a year, and then make an animated gif that shows the changing age distribution of the population over more than fifty years.

Sat, Apr 7, 2018

Us Monthly Births

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 months. Aaron works in Python, so I took the opportunity to play around with the data and redo the plots in R.

Fri, Apr 6, 2018

Filling Ordered Facets From the Bottom Row

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 the number of Bachelor's degrees awarded over the past twenty years. Afterwards, I was messing around with the data and wanted to draw some time-series plots for the various subject areas the NCES tracks.

Sat, Jan 6, 2018

Dataviz Signup

Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction will be published later this year by Princeton University Press. You can read a near-complete draft of the book at socviz.co. If you would like to receive one (1) email when the book is available for pre-order, please fill out this very short form. The goal of the book is to introduce readers to the principles and practice of data visualization in a humane, reproducible, and up-to-date way.

Thu, Sep 7, 2017

A Data Visualization Work in Progress

Data Visualization for Social Science: A Practical Introduction with R and ggplot2 I’m writing a book on data visualization, provisionally titled Data Visualization for Social Science: A practical introduction with R and ggplot2. As part of that process, largely because I’ve benefited so much myself from the availability of open and widely shared tools for software development, I’m making the draft version of the book available as its own website.

Wed, Mar 9, 2016

Plain Text and Pictures

Here are two small sites I made recently, and which I may continue to tweak and expand. The first, plain-text.co, presents “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social Science”. It is designed to address some questions about managing research and writing projects in the social sciences using plain-text and free or mostly-free tools like Emacs (or other text editors), R, pandoc, and make. The second, vissoc.co which I’ve mentioned before, compiles notes from a short course in data visualization I taught last semester.

Fri, Feb 12, 2016

Gravitational Network

The Gravitational Waves paper that was in the news yesterday has almost a thousand authors. (Actually there’s more than one paper—there’s the “discovery” paper and the “implications” paper.) Out of interest, I fed the list of authors in the “implications” paper into R and constructed an affiliation network with ties based on the university or research institute listed. Then I colored the nodes by the country of the primary institutional affiliation.

Wed, Feb 10, 2016

Data Visualization Course Notes

ASA Section Membership and Revenues. I taught a half-sized introductory seminar on data visualization last semester. It’s an introduction to some principles of data visualization for working social scientists, and is focused mostly on teaching people how to use ggplot effectively. I’ve made the (slightly rough-and-ready) course notes available as a website. The notes include numerous code samples, .Rmd files for every week, and there’s a GitHub repository containing all the material to build the site, including the datasets used to make the plots.

Sat, Jan 16, 2016

Two Y-Axes

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias shared this tweet from Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist with Charles Schwab, Inc: DailyShot: Here is a comparison of the monetary base with the S&P500 ... Coincidence? pic.twitter.com/QsdNhJdbRP — Liz Ann Sonders (@LizAnnSonders) January 15, 2016 Matt remarked that “Friends don’t let friends use two y-axes”. It’s a good rule. The topic came up a couple of times during the data visualization short course I taught last semester.