Publications by Method Matters
The Vibe of Flanders: Part 2
This blog post is the second installment in a series detailing analyses of the 2023 De Gemeente-Stadsmonitor (The Municipality and City Monitor) survey, conducted in the region of Flanders in Belgium. You can check out the first post here. In the previous post, we used Principal Components Analysis and data visualization techniques to understand th...
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The Vibe of Flanders: Part 1
What’s it like to live in Flanders these days? Flanders, the Northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, conducts a regular survey of the people who live here. The survey is called De Gemeente-Stadsmonitor (The Municipality and City Monitor), and covers a great many topics, from large societal issues to housing to mobility and climate. This post de...
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Gender Roles in Hit Country & R&B/Hip-Hop Lyrics (1990-2021): A TidyText Analysis With R
In this post, we will return to the dataset containing song lyrics from country and R&B/hip-hop songs that we analyzed in the previous post. The data consist of popular songs from the Billboard year-end music charts, and we will use the tidy analytic approach to text analysis to analyze how the two genres differ in their descriptions of men and w...
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Text Analysis of Job Descriptions for Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers and Data Analysts
Introduction In the previous post, the intrepid Jesse Blum and I analyzed metadata from over 6,500 job descriptions for data roles in seven European countries. In this post, we’ll apply text analysis to those job postings to better understand the technologies and skills that employers are looking for in data scientists, data engineers, data ana...
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Rap text analysis- Watch the Throne (Kanye West and Jay Z) – Part 1
Over the past couple of months I’ve been playing around with text analysis in R. I’m eventually going to use these methods for a business-type problem, but as a way to learn how to conduct different types of text analyses and to learn the methods, I’ve been looking at song lyrics for rap music.One of the texts I’ve been w...
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Rap text analysis- Watch the Throne (Kanye West and Jay Z) – Part 2
In my last post, I described some first text analyses I did with R, using wordclouds to visualize language use in Kanye West and Jay-Z’s collaborative 2011 album “Watch the Throne.”This post presents some more statistically-oriented analyses of language use in “Watch the Throne,” again with an eye towards presenting results ...
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Rap text analysis- Watch the Throne (Kanye West and Jay Z) – Part 3
This last post will give a quick overview of two other methods I used to try to understand Watch the Throne using text analysis with R. Last post about this album, I promise!The first analysis I’ll present here has to do with clustering of songs. I was very inspired by the Stanford Literary Lab’s series of pamphlets, particularly ...
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Analyzing Accupedo step count data in R
Accupedo is a great (and free!) step counting app that I’ve been using for a while now to keep track of how much I walk every day. The app measures the number of steps you make, and has some nice visualizations that allow you to see how many steps you’ve walked in the past days, weeks, months and years. Because I’m interested in data and d...
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Analyzing Accupedo step count data in R: Part 2 – Adding weather data
In my last set of posts, I wrote about analyzing data from the Accupedo step counter app I have on my phone. In this post, I’ll talk about some additional analysis I’ve done by merging the step counter data with weather data from another source.The website www.wunderground.com has freely available weather data available for most parts of the ...
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Showing Some Respect for Data Munging
In this post, I’d like to focus on data munging, e.g. the process of acquiring and arranging data (typically in a tidy manner) prior to data analysis. It’s common knowledge that data scientists spend an enormous amount of time munging data, but data analysis, modeling, and visualization get most of the attention at presentations, on blogs and...
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