Hey folks, I really hope you enjoyed the series of newsletters and videos of me recreating the visualizations presented by W.E.B. DuBois at the 1900 Paris Exposition. I can’t express how much I enjoyed making them. Some of them were pretty tricky and required a lot of work. But I think it was worth it! It definitely forced me to use some new-to-me tools like geom_polygon() and geom_sf(). Please let me know what you thought of the series! I wonder if there’d be any interest in a companion to...
12 days ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed recreating the “data portraits” from the collection of visualizations that WEB DuBois and his colleagues presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. You can find the entire collection of “data portraits” in a book assembled by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (here) or as a collection of plates through the Library of Congress (here). Perhaps this isn’t so obvious to my non-US readers and viewers, but February is Black History month. In...
19 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, I hope you have enjoyed the current series of newsletters and videos recreating “data portraits” from the WEB DuBois collection of visuals he showed at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. You can find the entire collection of “data portraits” in a book assembled by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (here) or as a collection of plates through the Library of Congress (here). I’ve really appreciated the positive feedback! These figures are pretty different from what we do in modern data...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, I hope you enjoyed thinking last week about how you would recreate Plate 12 from the WEB DuBois collection of visuals he showed at the 1900 Paris Exhibition using ggplot2 and related R tools. You can find the entire collection of “data portraits” in a book assembled by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (here) or as a collection of plates through the Library of Congress (here). I won’t reshare all the resources describing the collection, but do encourage you to check out last...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I’m at the end of a day after I pulled an all-nighter trying to hit a grant proposal deadline. I don’t recall ever doing this in college. I seem to pull an all-nighter every five years or so. I’m too old for this! Anyway, the proposal is in and now I’m ready to move on to fun things… like talking to you about visualizing data! A few years back Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert put together an amazing collection of visualizations by WEB DuBois that he presented at the 1900...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Wow, I really didn’t expect my overview of Positron to resonate with so many people last week on YouTube! I’ll work on coming up with another video showing Virtual Studio Code (VS Code) in action. As others have mentioned in the episode’s comments, I’m not really sure why Posit is building Positron instead of making things easier within VS Code for R users. To me the need for an IDE that allows people to use multiple programming languages is a red herring - VS Code does that...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I hope you’ve noticed that this newsletter and the YouTube channel have nearly caught up. At this point there’s a 10-day lag between when I post a newsletter describing a data visualization and when I post the recreation video. I could possibly push that to a 3-day lag, but I’d like people to have a chance to work through the code on their own before I give my solution. After having existential dread last week that I’d never find another good plot to share, it appears my cup...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I hope you all are doing well as we settle in to 2025. Here in southeastern Michigan winter has settled in. Our high temperatures have been below freezing for the past week and it looks like they will be for at least the next 10 days. Brrrr. Going outside reminds me to be grateful that our furnace works and that we’re able to keep it running. It’s easy to take that for granted. Perhaps this is what people had in mind when they made January, “National Poverty in America Awareness...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Happy 2025! I really hope that one of your resolutions for the coming year is to grow in confidence and skill using data analysis tools like R. Regardless, I’m honored that you continue to check out the content I describe here in the newsletter and on my YouTube channel. Thank you. Looking back on my 2024, I did a lot of thinking about how we learn, where I find inspirations, and how I teach. I have been fascinated by other YouTube channels that break down why songs are great, the...
2 months ago • 3 min read
