Hey folks, I’ve now produced three livestream videos. What do you think? Do you watch them live or watch them later? Or are they too long? I’m looking for honest feedback! I have to admit that if I hadn’t livestreamed these videos, they would not have been produced. It’s nice that I can more or less record and post without any editing. This is still a bit of an experiment. I think fewer people are watching the episodes which makes me worry that this might be an overall step backwards for you all. I want what I do to have maximum benefit, so please don’t hesitate to respond to this email and let me know what you think. Yesterday morning, I received a newsletter from Philip Bump who writes a column for the The Washington Post. He has a couple of newsletters, but this one is an “add on” to his columns where he shares more of the data behind what goes into his columns. Although not overly complicated, I thought this would be a fun “basic” plot for beginners but enough ornamentation for more advanced R users. This plot was an add on to his column on a generational rift in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the New York City mayoral primary election. In this plot he uses March 2025 data from Gallup to compare how the two parties differ in their support for Israelis versus Palestinans. So, how would I go about making this plot? We need the data. If you go to the Gallup article, the second plot has three tabs. One each for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. The plots show the percent, by party, who support Israelis or Palestinians. In the lower left corner of the plot is a link to “Get the data”, which downloads a CSV-formatted file for the data in each plot. We’ll need to get both the Democrat and Republican datasets. Also, we’ll need to go back to the first plot and get the data for “All Americans”. For each of these files, we’ll need to read them in and join them into a single tibble. We can read the three files in to a single tibble using Again, at the fundamental level, this is a line plot with three groups. We can do this in Now for the ornamentation. First, the axes will need some help. There are no axis titles or ticks. Those can be removed with Second, the gridline choices are “interesting”. The y-axis gridlines look fairly standard. However, we’ll have to add a thicker black line at zero. For the x-axis gridlines he has one at 2016 and October 7, 2023. We’ll have to make those x-axis gridlines and the zero line using Finally, there is text in the right hand margin indicating what each line represents. We can place the text using All in all, this should be a less intense plot than what I’ve been making lately. At the same time, we get to practice some fun stuff with text. I think it will also give an opportunity to compare how we use
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Hey folks! I’m in proposal writing mode again. Unfortunately, I am finding my weekly search for a data visualization to share with you is leading me down unproductive internet rabbit holes. So, I thought I’d share an idea with you that I hope resonates. If you have any reactions, please send them my way! For the past year or so I have been recreating other people’s data visualizations in an attempt to learn new techniques with R and expand the type of data that I normally visualize. The idea...
Hey folks! Here in the US, vaccines continue to be a hot button issue. I feel like this issue is really an amalgamation of multiple issues including the decline in respect for authority figures, frustration with COVID, inability to assess risk at a personal level, and parents feeling like they are losing rights. Do people really want their kids to get sick unnecessarily? I doubt it. It’s also in the news because the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a vaccine skeptic/denier with many...
Hey folks! Sorry for the hiatus in getting you a newsletter into your inbox. The end of the summer/beginning of the academic year has been pretty chaotic. Actually, I had what I thought would be an interesting plot to recreate, but then I wasn’t able to find the original data and I wasn’t really interested in simulating it. Oh well. I’m also finding it hard to come up with interesting data visualizations from out in the wild. One of my go-to’s, Philip Bump, stopped working for the Washington...