Data Journalism in R

  • 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
  • How to use R to analyze racial profiling at police stops
    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 —
  • How to analyze the screen times of presidential candidates
    Who and what is being discussed on cable television news can reveal a lot about our current media landscape or political state of affairs.  The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, built by Stanford University’s Computer Graphics Lab and John S. Knight Fellowship Program, provides the data for us to look at trends in cable news
  • 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