Data Journalism in R

  • How to Analyze bluesky Posts and Trends with R
    If the only things you’re doing on bluesky are scrolling, liking and posting, then you are still riding a bike with training wheels. Hear me out. There are several simple and free tools out there that let you take advantage of bluesky’s secret weapon: its open-source skeleton. A how-to A few firehose ideas: First, you’re probably
  • Easily clean up messy databases with fuzzy matching in R
    One of the biggest challenges working with text data is the many different ways that people can enter the exact same information. A human knows that “St. Lucie, Florida,” “Saint Lucie, FL,” and “St Lucy, Florida” are probably all the same place, but a computer doesn’t. “Fuzzy” matching pulls similarities between the letters in words and
  • How to use R to dig for story ideas
    Many people think of R as a way to visualize data, but it can also be a useful tool to explore datasets and seek possible story ideas. At the 2023 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, Charles Minshew, the digital storytelling editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, walked through using basic R code to question datasets. Knowing
  • Turning your small-multiple charts into maps using R
    The geofacet R package provides a way to flexibly visualize data for different geographical regions, combining multiple small charts into a map.
  • 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 R functions for manipulating strings in R, and introduce the stringr package from the tidyverse. The datasets being used are being analyzed as part of