IRA Tweet Data You may have heard that two researchers at Clemson University analyzed almost 3 millions tweets from the Internet Research Agency (IRA) - a "Russian troll factory". In partnership with FiveThirtyEight, they made all of their data available on GitHub. So of course, I had to read the files ...

Highlighting Specific Cases in ggplot2 Here's my belated Statistics Sunday post, using a cool technique I just learned about: gghighlight. This R package works with ggplot2 to highlight a subset of data. To demonstrate, I'll use a dataset I analyzed for a previous post about my 2017 reading habits. [Side note: ...

Statistics Sunday: Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency As a mixed methods researcher, I love working with qualitative data, but I also love the idea of using quantitative methods to add some meaning and context to the words. This is the main reason I've started digging into using R for ...

Converting Between Effect Sizes I'm currently working on my promised video on mixed effects meta-analysis, and was planning on covering this particular topic in that video - converting between effect sizes. But I decided to do this as a separate post that I can reference in the video, which I ...

As I've been blogging more about statistics, R, and research in general, I've been trying to increase my online presence, sharing my blog posts in groups of like-minded people. Those efforts seem to have paid off, based on my view counts over the past ...

I haven't had a lot of time to play with this but yesterday, I discovered the tuber R package, which allows you to interact with the YouTube API.To use the tuber package, not only do you need to install it in R - you'll need a Google account and ...

How to Read in and Clean Your Facebook Data - I recently learned that you can download all of your Facebook data, so I decided to check it out and bring it into R. To access your data, go to Facebook, and click on the white down arrow in the ...

I recently discovered the R Graph Gallery, where users can share the beautiful visualizations they've created using R and its various libraries (especially ggplot2). One of my favorite parts about this gallery is a section called Art From Data, in whic...

Cloudy with a Chance of Words Lots of fun projects in the works, so today's post will be short - a demonstration on how to create wordclouds, both with and without sentiment analysis results. While I could use song lyrics again, I decided to use a different dataset that comes ...

I've just returned from a business trip - lots of long days, working sometimes from 8 am to 9 pm or 10 pm. I didn't get a chance to write this week's Statistics Sunday post, in part because I wasn't entirely certain what to write about. But as I starte...

I'm currently out of town and not spending as much time on my computer as I have over the last couple months. (It's what happens when you're the only one in your department at work and also most of your hobbies involve a computer.) But I wanted to write up ...

How Has Taylor Swift's Word Choice Changed Over Time?Sunday night was a big night for Taylor Swift - not only was she nominated for multiple Billboard Music Awards; she took home Top Female Artist and Top Selling Album. So I thought it was a good time for some more ...

Welcome to the Hotel CaliforniaAs promised in last week's post, this week: sentiment analysis, also with song lyrics.Sentiment analysis is a method of natural language processing that involves classifying words in a document based on whether a word is positive or negative, or whether it is related to a ...

Earlier this week, the Association for Psychological Science sent out a press release about a study examining what makes a song popular:Researchers Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania and Grant Packard of Wilfrid Laurier University were interested in understanding the relationship between similarity and success. In a recent ...

Statistics Sunday Last week, I showed how to tokenize text. Today I'll use those functions to do some text analysis of one of my favorite types of text: song lyrics. Plus, this is a great opportunity to demonstrate a new R package I discovered: geniusR, which will download lyrics from ...

Statistics Sunday: Tokenizing TextI recently started working my way through Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach by Julia Silge and David Robinson. There are many interesting ways text analysis can be used, not only for research interests but for marketing and business insights. Today, I'd like to introduce one ...

Prediction with Binomial RegressionApril A to Z is complete! We now return to your regularly scheduled statistics blog posts! Today, I want to talk about an issue I touched on during A to Z: using regression to predict values and see how well your model is doing.Specifically, I talked ...

Z is for Z-Scores and StandardizingLast April, I wrapped up the A to Z of Statistics with a post about Z-scores. It seems only fitting that I'm wrapping this April A to Z with the same topic. Z-scores are frequently used, sometimes when you don't even realize it. When you ...