Category: Data Journalism in R
How to use hierarchical cluster analysis on time series data
Which cities have experienced similar patterns in violent crime rates over time? That kind of analysis, based on time series data, can be done using hierarchical cluster analysis, a statistical […]
Diagnosing the accuracy of your linear regression in R
In this post we’ll cover the assumptions of a linear regression model. There are a ton of books, blog posts, and lectures covering these topics in greater depth (and we’ll […]
How to explore correlations in R
This post will cover how to measure the relationship between two numeric variables with the corrr package. We will look at how to assess a variable’s distribution using skewness, kurtosis, […]
How to download YouTube data in R using “tuber” and “purrr”
Accessing YouTube’s metadata such as views, likes, dislikes and comments is simple in R thanks to thetuber package by Gaurav Sood. Sood wrote an excellent, easy-to-use package for accessing the […]
How to build a GIF of satellite imagery in R
“The timelapse imagery of Chennai’s disappearing reservoirs is mind boggling,” Earther senior reporter Brian Kahn wrote on Twitter recently. Kahn had just published the piece “Why Chennai, India’s Sixth Biggest […]
Using R to explore the relationship between San Francisco MUNI citations and the weather
Anybody who rides San Francisco’s MUNI regularly has had their Clipper Card checked by a fare inspector. Anecdotally, it also seemed to me that my Clipper Card was being checked […]
Exploring Chicago rideshare data in R
Last month, the City of Chicago released detailed rideshare data from companies like Uber, Lyft and Via, making it the first city in the country to share anonymized data on […]
How to build a website with Blogdown in R
Want to build a website right in RStudio? blogdown is an R package that allows you to create websites from R markdown files using Hugo, an open-source static site generator […]
How to build a bubble chart of individuals mentioned in the Mueller report
When the redacted Mueller report was released last week, journalists across the country scrambled to read through and analyze the document. Data scientists and information designers were hard at work, […]
How to access APIs in R
APIs, or application program interfaces, are a way for people to access data in a plain text format using multiple programming languages. Many websites, organizations and services offer APIs for […]
How to model with gradient boosting machine in R
The tutorial is part 2 of our #tidytuesday post from last week, which explored bike rental data from Washington, D.C. Check it out here. The following tutorial will use a […]
Exploring bike rental behavior using R
Bikes have become one of the fastest growing modes of city travel which is why it’s no surprise that Lyft and Uber are getting into the two-wheeler game. Lyft’s recent […]
Pivoting data from columns to rows (and back!) in the tidyverse
TLDR: This tutorial was prompted by the recent changes to the tidyr package (see the tweet from Hadley Wickham below). Two functions for reshaping columns and rows (gather() and spread()) […]
Why Sharon Machlis wrote a book on R for journalists
Since Sharon Machlis published her book “Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism” last December, at least one professor is already using it in his course at the University of […]
From deep learning to clean_names(), resources from Data Journalism in R
Books to check out Deep Learning in R This text is from by Francois Chollet and J. J. Allaire. The authors cover these topics in-depth with plenty of code examples. Analyzing Baseball Data […]
Scraping HTML tables and downloading files with R
The Department of Criminal Justice in Texas keeps records of every inmate they execute. This tutorial will show you how to scrape that data, which lives in a table on […]
Bringing textual analysis tools to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the subject of extensive news coverage during his confirmation hearings, with Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations hanging heavy over the process. Now formally […]
How to map point data and polygon shapefiles in R
I recently published a series of interactive maps for Beeradvocate magazine that explored storm surge scenarios and low-lying breweries in Boston, New York City, Charleston and Miami. Here’s Boston: This […]
A data history of popular hip-hop
Storybench correspondent Alexander Frandsen has a data-driven exploration of merging Billboard’s “Hot Rap Songs” category with lyrics from Genius’s API. Check it out here. Alexander Frandsen Alex Frandsen is a fourth-year journalism major […]
How to install R on a Jupyter notebook
This post walks through how to install R on a Jupyter notebook, load in data and build a visualization. Start by installing python using homebrew. Install python Open Terminal and enter the […]
How to get Twitter data with rtweet in R
There’s a new process for getting data from Twitter with rtweet, so I put this document together as a guide for users looking for help in setting up the API, […]
Exploring Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz ads on Facebook using R
When and how often are Beto O’Rourke ads being rolled out on Facebook and who is paying for them? What is the sentiment of those ads and how do Beto’s […]
Mapping search data from Google Trends in R
This is a quick introduction on how to get and visualize Google search data with both time and geographical components using the R packages gtrendsR, maps and ggplot2. In this […]
Using French wine reviews to understand TF-IDF, a measure of how unique a word is to a document
“The heady scent of grapefruit and tangelo peel immediately add savoriness to the crisp green-apple fruit that is evident on the nose. But there are also richer hints of honey […]
How to build an animated map of tweets about the NBA finals in R
After beating the Cleveland Cavaliers in four games, the Golden State Warriors have won the 2018 NBA finals. We decided to build an animated map of Twitter mentions of #DubNation […]
How to plot state-by-state data on a map of the U.S. in R
While I usually turn to Carto.com or Datawrapper.de for my mapping needs, I decided to give R a whirl. The following tutorial will take craft beer awards data from Great […]
Getting started with stringr for textual analysis in R
Manipulating characters – a.k.a. non-numerical data – is an essential skill for anyone looking to visualize or analyze text data. This tutorial will go over a few of the base […]
Working with The New York Times API in R
Have you ever come across a resource that you didn't know existed, but once you find it you wonder how you ever got along without it? I had this feeling […]
How to merge and clean up multiple CSVs using R
This tutorial solves a problem I was having when working through the exploratory data analysis exercises in Doing Data Science by Cathy O’Neil and Rachel Schutt. I highly recommended picking up a copy for yourself. […]
Sentiment analysis of (you guessed it!) Donald Trump’s tweets
In my last post, I demonstrated how to use the twitteR package to collect data from Twitter in R. I have since learned that while twitteR still works, it is […]