Publications by Julia Silge
Ten Thousand Tweets
I started learning the statistical programming language R this past summer, and discovering Hadley Wickham’s data visualization package ggplot2 has been a joy and a revelation. When I think back to how I made all the plots for my astronomy dissertation in the early 2000s (COUGH SUPERMONGO COUGH), I feel a bit in awe of what ggplot2 can do and h...
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Joy to the World, and also Anticipation, Disgust, Surprise…
In my previous blog post, I analyzed my Twitter archive and explored some aspects of my tweeting behavior. When do I tweet, how much do retweet people, do I use hashtags? These are examples of one kind of question, but what about the actual verbal content of my tweets, the text itself? What kinds of questions can we ask and answer about the text ...
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This Is the Place, Apparently
My family and I moved to Utah about 5 years ago and we have found ourselves thoroughly in love in with our new home state. I didn’t know much about it before we began the process of contemplating a move here, and I find that is often true of many people. Let’s use some choropleth maps and demographic exploration to learn a bit more about this...
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Health Care Indicators in Utah Counties
The state of Utah (my adopted home) has an Open Data Catalog with lots of interesting data sets, including a collection of health care indicators from 2014 for the 29 counties in Utah. The observations for each county include measurements such as the infant mortality rate, the percent of people who don’t have insurance, what percent of people h...
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Water World
I live in Utah, an extremely dry state. Like much of the western United States, Utah is experiencing water stress from increasing demand, episodes of drought, and conflict over water rights. At the same time, Utahns use a lot of water per capita compared to residents of other states. According to the United States Geological Survey, in 2014 peopl...
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More Fun with Choropleth Maps
I have a guest post up today at Ari Lamstein’s blog where I show some more fun things that can be done with the Religious Congregations and Membership Study at the ARDA that I used to look at Utah. I looked in some detail at Iowa ahead of their caucus in a few days, in light of all the news lately about Republican presidential candidates courti...
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Mapping US Religion Adherence by County in R
Today’s guest post is by Julia Silge. After reading Julia’s analysis of religions in America (“This is the Place, Apparently“) I invited her to teach my readers how to map information about US Religious Adherence by County in R. Julia can be found blogging here or on Twitter. I took Ari’s free email course for getting started with the c...
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Connecting Religion and Demographics
I have my second guest post up today at Ari Lamstein’s blog where I conclude my exploration of the Religious Congregations and Membership Study at the ARDA. In this post I show how we can look at the relationships between a data set like the religion census and demographic data to gain context and understanding. Go over there to read the detail...
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Exploring the Relationship between Religion and Demographics in R
Today’s guest post is our second by Julia Silge. In her first post (“Mapping US Religion Adherence by County in R“) she demonstrated how to work with US religion adherence data in R. In this post she explores the relationship between that dataset and US Demographic data. Julia can be found blogging here or on Twitter. I started exploring t...
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Death Comes to Us All
I have been working with a data set on causes of death in my adopted home state of Utah for a little while now, and I had been struggling with the best way to visualize it. This week, David Robinson released the gganimate package to create animated ggplot2 plots and I thought “AH HA! This is what I have needing.” The data on causes of death i...
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