Publications by Social data blog
Heatmap tables
I blogged earlier (http://socialdatablog.com/what-is-wrong-with-this-graph) about the well-known risks of implying a continuous data scale in a graph where there isn't one. I just produced this alternative in the form of a heatmap table, i.e. a heatmap in which the numbers themselves are also shown. Perhaps not quite as intuitive but less mislead...
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How do you explain reproducible research to clients?
Most of the statistics work I do now is reproducible research – this can offer a big advantage for clients but of course that doesn’t necessarily mean they realise it … Below is a text we have been pasting in at the bottom of the source documents (and which therefore appears in the pdf’s) to explain reproducible research. Would be very i...
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Stop your figures jumping about in odfWeave
If you use odfWeave to produce figures, you will probably find they jump about when scrolling through the document – because the figures and figure frames are anchored in openoffice to the paragraph and not “as character”. The only way to fix this in a finished document is to right-click on the figures and select anchor / as character. But ...
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Automatic pdf generation and versioning with odfWeave
odfWeave is a great tool for your reproducible research workflow, using R to produce reproducible OpenOffice reports. But a few pieces are lacking. – It is a bit of a drag, every time you want to make a pdf, to have to find and open your output document and click on the pdf button. – You have to manually change document names to keep track of...
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What helped the the Egyptian revolution the most: Twitter, or the government switching it off?
I have been really interested in the “meme” that the Egyptian revolution was “the first social media revolution” and have tolerated infographics that correlate specific twitter activity with events in Egypt beyond. And I am sure we have all reminded ourselves that correlation is not causation. I was recently listening to an Egyptian coll...
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Heatmap tables done better, in Sweave and latex
I wrote before about using heatmap tables to combine the strengths of tables and graphics for nominal data. Here is a neat approach using Sweave and latex to produce an effect like in the picture. This latex code is self-contained. Just save it as myfile.Rnw, run Sweave(myfile.Rnw) from inside R and then pdflatex myfile.tex at the command line ...
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Simple network diagrams in R
Why study networks? Development and aid projects these days are more and more often focussing on supporting networks, so tools to analyse networks are always welcome. In this post I am going to present a very easy-to-use package for the stats program R which makes nice-looking graphs of these kinds of networks. In a recent project for a client, o...
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Using R for classification in small-N studies
Rick Davies just wrote an interesting post which combined thoughts on QCA (and multi-valued QCA or mvQCA) and classification trees with thoughts on INUS causation and classification trees. The question was something like: how can we look at a small-to-medium set of cases (like a dozen or a hundred countries or development programs) and tease ou...
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