Category: How to
What I learned applying data science to U.S. redistricting
Deciding whether to reelect President Donald Trump isn’t the only choice Americans will have to make when they head to the voting booths this November. More than 5,000 state lawmakers […]
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 collect tweets from the Twitter Streaming API using Python
Twitter provides a comprehensive streaming API that developers can use to download data about tweets in real-time, if they can figure out how to use it effectively. In this tutorial, […]
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 make a multilayered Google My Map using news articles on invasive species
Wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat waves, invasive species. These are the climate change news that I read most every morning I visit The Weather Channel’s homepage for the day’s weather forecast. […]
How I visualized “Trump” mentions in hip-hop songs using D3
Hip-hop is often brutally honest about controversial issues in society – money, guns, drugs, sex and, of course, politics. I found a dataset collected and cleaned by FiveThirtyEight containing the […]
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 do basic text mining using Google Sheets
While techniques for text mining, sentiment analysis and other natural language processing are ubiquitous on the Internet, they’re not always accessible to students. I recently ran this tutorial in my […]
How to build margin of victory election maps with Datawrapper
With the campaign for 2020 in full swing, it’s election map season. I was recently poking around Politico’s 2018 midterm election maps and thought I’d recreate their county-by-county Margin of […]
How to make a longform narrative podcast without breaking the bank
If you’re from a small town, you might know the feeling. You open up Facebook and practically all of your friends from home are freaking out. Either last night’s winning […]
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 […]
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()) […]
How a dataset on lighting strikes taught me to not take data at face value
Being struck by lightning is often used as an example of heavenly retribution because it is so unlikely. The occurrence is simply so rare that it might as well be […]
How to animate a map in Adobe After Effects
Deforestation and sea level rise are two very important parts of environmental news. Having recently worked on a piece tackling deforestation, I wanted to create a map that showed Amazon […]
How to build a heatmap in Python
Heatmaps are effective visualization tools for representing different values of data over a specific geographical area. You could, for example, use them for temperatures, rainfall or electricity use. In this […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 download song lyrics from Genius using Python
Coding and I are not on the best of terms. After a traumatic three-year stretch in middle school in which I barely scraped by in my computer science classes, I […]
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, […]
How to map 2018 ballot initiatives on marijuana, energy and voter registration
Washington could impose a polluter’s fee on greenhouse-gas emitters starting in 2020. North Dakota may legalize recreational marijuana while expunging existing criminal records for certain drug-associated arrests, though that initiative might well […]
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 […]