Publications by Drew Conway
Network of People who Twitter about R
On Tuesday I will be speaking to the Bay Area R group about doing social network analysis in R with igraph. During the talk I will (hopefully) be doing some live SNA on the audience using R and generating data via Twitter. As a preview, or small taste for those not able to attend, I have generated network data from the last 100 tweets—as of ...
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My Five Rules for Data Visualization
Tonight the NYC R Meetup will be discussing data visualization in R using ggplot2. As part of tonight’s meeting I will be providing a very brief show and tell, which includes mostly code examples and external resources. This exercise has had me thinking quite a bit about data visualization. In addition, a few days ago the Security Crank (gre...
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Advanced SNA with R, via Harvard Political Nets Conference
End of semester madness has begun, so posting will likely be light this week. To keep you busy, David Lazer recently posted the five video series of the Goudreau-Hunter tutorial on social network analysis using R from the 2009 Harvard Political Networks Conference. Each video run about 60 minutes, so these will literally provide hours of edutain...
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Must-Have R Packages for Social Scientists
After recently having to think critically about the value of various R packages for social science research, I realized that others might find value in a post on “must-have” R packages for social scientists. After the immensely popular post on this topic for Python packages a follow-up seemed appropraite. If you conduct social science resea...
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Visualizing Data with R and ggplot2 (video w/ slides)
On December 3, 2009 I presented a brief talk at the NYC R meetup on how to create data visualizations with R using the immensely powerful ggplot2 package. The talk is very light on motivation but heavy on examples, so it may be more useful to those with some R and/or ggplot2 experience. The speaker that preceded me, Harlan Harris, provided a mu...
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Brief Analysis of Abdulmutallab (Christmas Day bomber) Web Posting Data
Thanks to Evan Kohlman at the NEFA Foundation for compiling, and Danger Room for publicizing, the data set of all of Farouk Abdulmutallab’s posts to the Islamic Forum on Gawaher.com. Since Evan took the initiative to download and save the raw HTML data, I thought it would be useful to go one step further and parse it into a more useable (anal...
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Learning R via Python…or the other way around (with video!)
Last night I was one of five speakers at the NYC R Statistical Programming Meetup. The topic last night was dubbed the R Rosetta Stone, and the intent was to show how R as a language translated into several other analytical platforms and programming languages. Other speakers covered MATLAB, SAS, SQL/Postges and Clojure/Incanter—I discussed Py...
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Donate to the R Video Hosting Fund
Today I finished uploading a couple new talks to the growing repository of online presentations from the NYC R Statistical Meetup. Going forward, my plan is—whenever possible—to make all talks and presentation materials available online, in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible. Our volunteer speakers bring immense expertise to...
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What Countries are ‘Pulling their Weight’ for Haiti?
Using the data provided ReliefWeb on the Appeals and Funding to Haiti (h/t DataBlog) and the most recent GNP estimates, I decided to do a little “back of the envelope” analysis. With GNP as a proxy for a country’s wealth, the hypothesis is that pledges should roughly be a linear function of wealth, i.e., the more you have the more you can ...
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Predicting the Locations of ‘Emergency’ Ushahidi Reports in Port-au-Prince, and Implications for Crowdsourcing
Recently, Patrick Meier, PhD candidate at Tufts University and member of the Ushahidi Advisory Board, provided me with a dataset containing the first 72 hours of reports registered with Ushahidi in Port-au-Prince after the January 12th earthquake. First, a huge thank you to Patrick for providing me with this data and the opportunity to analyze i...
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