Publications by Kyle Walker
Visualizing the economics of tourism in the Pacific with Plotly
Over the last month or so, I’ve been working a lot with Plotly to visualize data for my World Regional Geography course. Plotly is a web-based service that allows for the creation of interactive, D3-based visualizations that can be easily shared. Visualizations are deployed and hosted on Plotly’s servers, so the service requires a connectio...
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Interactive international population pyramids with R, rCharts
I find population pyramids to be very effective teaching tools. In short, a population pyramid is a type of chart that shows the population size of different age cohorts on the x-axis, with gender usually displayed back-to-back to create the shape of a “pyramid.” It is used to illustrate a snapshot of the age and sex structure of a populati...
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Exploring the United Nations population projections with rCharts
Please note: some NVD3 charts are performing very slowly in the latest version of Google Chrome at the moment; see this GitHub issue. As such, this post is best viewed in other browsers. I recently came across this really interesting post from Ben Jones that explores the history and future of world population change with Tableau. I haven’t us...
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Life expectancy trends in the former USSR
When covering Russia and the former republics of the USSR in World Regional Geography, a key part of my material addresses the issues that some of these countries have had in their transitions from centralized to market economies. Some of these countries experienced dramatic demographic shifts after the dissolution of the USSR, including a notic...
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Using Slidify to teach with interactive content
I frequently come across criticisms of PowerPoint as a presentation tool, which is interesting to me given the ubiquity of its use across industries. When I worked as a data analyst prior to coming to TCU, I frequently prepared PowerPoints using a company template for my boss’s presentations or for talks of my own. In academia, we have consid...
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Charting time series data with dygraphs in R and Python
This past week, the good people at RStudio advertised over Twitter the release of htmlwidgets for R, a project in collaboration with rCharts wizards Ramnath Vaidyanathan and Kenton Russell. The packages showcased are incredible; I was particularly intrigued by the dygraphs package, which creates interactive time-series charts. Aside from maps, ti...
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Mapping religious adherence in the US with CartoDB
Before coming to TCU, I worked as a data analyst for the Church Pension Group, which manages the retirement funds and provides other financial services for the Episcopal Church. I was part of a small research group that completed both internal and public-facing studies using the company’s data. You can take a look at some of the studies I wor...
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Fetching roads data in R with tigris
There are three functions available in the tigris package (https://github.com/walkerke/tigris) to fetch road data. primary_roads() loads all interstates for the entire US; primary_secondary_roads() gets you interstates and US/state/county highways, by state; and roads() gets you all road segments for a given county within a state. In this example...
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Fetching roads data in R with tigris
There are three functions available in the tigris package (https://github.com/walkerke/tigris) to fetch road data. primary_roads() loads all interstates for the entire US; primary_secondary_roads() gets you interstates and US/state/county highways, by state; and roads() gets you all road segments for a given county within a state. In this example...
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acs14lite: A lightweight R interface to the 2010-2014 ACS API
I use data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey all of the time. I also use R all of the time. Naturally, this means that I often use ACS data in R – which is pertinent given last week’s release of the new 2010-2014 ACS estimates. I wanted easy access to the data to facilitate my on-going research on demographic trends in U...
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