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

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

The geofacet R package provides a way to flexibly visualize data for different geographical regions, combining multiple small charts into a map.

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

Working as a data journalist for Eye on Ohio, along with a team of reporters at the Cincinnati Enquirer, I developed a project on the role of racial profiling in police stops in Ohio’s largest cities. The work was part of Stanford University’s open policing project. Stanford developed the base R script for this —