Sociology

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, Mar 24, 2018

Making Slides

I was asked to give a short talk in my Departmental Proseminar yesterday on the topic of giving presentations, and specifically about making slides effective. There is more than one way to give a good talk, and there is more than one way to make “good slides” or—better—make good use of slides and other material you might want to show people. So the things I’ll talk about and especially the specific techniques I’ll discuss are selected from many good ways to present yourself and your work.

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.

Mon, Oct 2, 2017

Assault Deaths to 2015

Every couple of years—usually after one of the inevitable mass shootings—I find myself updating this graph. The originals were done in 2012. You can read America is a Violent Country, and Assault Deaths Within the United States to see those. This morning I pulled the latest figures from the OECD Health Status database. The method and scope are the same as before. Here is the main figure, showing assault death rates for the US and 23 other OECD countries.

Thu, Sep 14, 2017

Radio Nuance

I was interviewed recently by Brian Southwell for his public radio show, The Measure of Everyday Life. We talked for about half an hour, first about Nuance and then a little about performativity in social research, and the ethical issues associated with it. You can listen directly to the episode, find it on iTunes, or through your favorite podcast app.

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.

Tue, Jun 27, 2017

A Little More Nuance

“Fuck Nuance” has just been published in Sociological Theory. The pace of academic publishing being what it is, the paper has been out in the world for a while in draft form, but it’s nice to see the canonical version appear. The issue also contains a symposium on theory in Sociology, with contributions from Ivan Ermakoff, Ashley Mears, and Max Besbris and Shamus Khan. I’ve described the circumstances of the paper’s conception before.