Hey folks, Long time friends of Riffomonas know that I’ve been teaching data science classes for close to 20 years. The hallmark of my teaching has been three-day workshops where I either teach R (here and here) or the mothur software package. I’ve gotten feedback that three days is just too much time for people to carve out of their busy schedules. So, I’m excited to be offering a 1-day (6 hours) data visualization workshop on May 9th. This will cover an introduction to the ggplot2 package....
7 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, I’m really excited to be offering a 1-day (6 hours) data visualization workshop on May 9th. It will cover the basics of ggplot2. If you’ve been following along this newsletter for anytime, you know I’ve thought a lot about how we learn. A critical element of learning is to create a mental model that we can hang ideas on to flesh out our understanding of a concept. The “grammar of graphics” is one such mental model for building plots. It is instantiated in ggplot2 - that’s the “gg”...
14 days ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I somehow got through the month of March without a plot to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hard to believe that it has been five years. I know that my life and how I work has radically changed because of the pandemic. I started posting videos to YouTube and writing newsletters during the pandemic to help people who wanted to learn to use R while they were locked out of their labs. At one point I taught a workshop for U of Michigan researchers that...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Before digging into this week’s data visualization, I wanted to give you all a heads-up about some learning activities I’m currently developing. First, in the next month or so I will be hosting a one-day, online workshop on the basics of {ggplot2}. If you feel that the things I talk about in this newsletter or on my YouTube channel are a bit beyond your grasp, this would be perfect for you. Second, I’ve gotten great feedback about a group coaching format that I’ve been developing...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, It’s March! That means the days are getting longer, the weather is pretty bonkers, the Cubs season has already started, and it’s time for March Madness. For the uninitiated, that’s the roughly month-long period starting last week when men’s and women’s college basketball teams compete for their conference championship and then the National Championship. After falling apart at the end of the regular season the University of Michigan Men’s team won their conference tournament and...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Did you know that March is Women’s History Month? Each year The Economist updates what they call the “Glass Ceiling Index”. This is a measure of “the role and influence of women in the workforce”. It’s an aggregate of ten factors including the gender gap in wages, work force participation, and higher education. Sadly, the article is behind a paywall. They also haven’t made their data publicly available. Regardless, you can get a static copy of the article through archiv.is. Here’s...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, This has been a busy week! I’ve been on campus teaching a 3 day, all day, R class. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these live workshops off campus. If you’re interested in me coming to your campus, you coming to Michigan, or being in a Zoom-based workshop, please let me know! I really love being able to interact with you all in workshops. If your experience has been at all like my own the past month or so, your conversations have all had a tinge of anxiety about the...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
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...
about 2 months 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...
2 months ago • 4 min read
