Publications by R on kieranhealy.org
Heatmaps of Mortality Rates
As part of the run-up to the release of Data Visualization (out in about ten days! Currently 30% off on Amazon!), I’ve been playing with graphing different kinds of data. One great source of rich time-series data is mortality.org, which hosts a collection of standardized demographic data for a large number of countries. Mortality rates are ofte...
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Canada Map
I taught my Data Visualization seminar in Philadelphia this past Friday and Saturday. It covers most of the content of my book, including a unit on making maps. The examples in the book are from the United States. But what about other places? Two of the participants were from Canada, and so here’s an example that walks through the process of gr...
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Teaching and Learning Materials for Data Visualization
Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction will begin shipping next week. I’ve written an R package that contains datasets, functions, and a course packet to go along with the book. The socviz package contains about twenty five datasets and a number of utility and convenience functions. The datasets range in size from things with just a few r...
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French Mortality Poster
Based on the heatmaps I drew earlier this month, I made a poster of two centuries of data on mortality rates in France for males and females. It turned out reasonably well, I think. I will probably get it blown up to a nice large size and put it up on the wall. I’ve had very good results with PhD Posters for work like this over the years, by th...
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Dataviz Course Packet Quickstart
Chapter 2 of Data Visualization walks you through setting up an R Project, and takes advantage of R Studio’s support for RMarkdown templates. That is, once you’ve created your project in R Studio, can choose File > New File > R Markdown, like this: Select R Markdown … And then choose “From Template” on the left side of the dialog box ...
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Statswars
I am stuck at home sick today, so I decided to provide a relational analysis of the Stats Package Wars that have been bubbling away for the past week. True in all its details. If you want something slightly more constructive, consider The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social Science. Related To leave a comment for the author, please fo...
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Four Dataviz Posters
I was asked for some examples of posters I’ve made using R and ggplot. Here are four. Some of these are done from start to finish in R, others involved some post-processing in Illustrator, usually to adjust some typographical elements or add text in a sidebar. I’ve linked to a PDF of each one, along with a pointer to the original post about t...
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The Persistence of the Old Regime, Again
A few years ago I wrote a post about the stickiness of college and university rankings in the United States. It’s been doing the rounds again, so I thought I’d revisit it and redraw a few of the graphs I made then. In 1911, Kendric Babcock made an effort to rank US Universities and Colleges. In his report, Babcock divided schools into four ...
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Installing Socviz
I’ve gotten a couple of reports from people having trouble installing the socviz library that’s meant to be used with Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. As best as I can tell, the difficulties are being caused by GitHub’s rate limits. The symptom is that, after installing the tidyverse and devtools libraries, you try install_gith...
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A Quick and Tidy Look at the 2018 GSS
The data from the 2018 wave of the General Social Survey was released during the week, leading to a flurry of graphs showing various trends. The GSS is one of the most important sources of information on various aspects of U.S. society. One of the best things about it is that the data is freely available for more than forty years worth of surveys...
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