I remember when I first got into Python and heard about Anaconda. It wasn’t really clear to me if Anaconda was a “dialect” of Python code, a really awesome suite of tools for working with Python, or something else. Turns out that Anaconda is first and foremost a distribution ...

“How do I get better at data?” is a question I get a lot. It’s an interesting one to answer — plenty of great resources are out there, it’s just a matter of finding the right sequence for the right objective and circumstances. I assume “get better at data” ...

I remember my first days of coding R: I would search around for how to do X task, and find out that Y package would be really helpful. But that led to more questions: What are packages in the first place, and how do you use them? In this post, ...

As a data educator, I’ve helped plenty of self-styled math- and technophobes find out that data and analytics is for them, and it’s fun. These learners are often pretty surprised by how approachable and humorous many analytics professionals are. I mean, not all of us are out of ...

To an outsider, some R packages sound too cheeky to be very valuable. Take, for example, the tidyverse. What on earth does that groaner of a portmanteau do? By the end of this workshop, you’ll know that the tidyverse is so-called because it’s a collection of packages used ...

The Clark’s Nutcracker has landed! That’s the bird on the cover of Advancing into Analytics, copies of which I received the other day. There’s that new author enthusiasm! You can now get your digital or paperback copy too at your bookseller of choice. Learn more about the ...

When many hear “data analytics” these days, they think of graphical user interface (GUI)-driven business intelligence (e.g. Tableau), data warehousing (e.g. Snowflake), or data preparation (e.g. Alteryx) platforms. These tools have their place (some more than others) in the analytics stack. But rather than focus on ...

I’m launching a book at a weird time. Toward the (one can only hope) end of a pandemic, book sales are booming, but it’s so hard to replicate the experience of even the simplest in-person launch party or tour. Many of us are overwhelmed and uncertain about the ...

Online conferences are getting to be a tough sell: the supply has exceeded the demand. It’s just so hard to make (and keep) the time for a conference when you’re sitting at home, and hard to know what’s quality. At the same time, the communities I belong ...

When I was an undergrad, a professor suggested I learn this statistical programming language called R. I took one look at the interface, panicked, and left. A lot has changed in the R world since then, not the least of which was the release of the RStudio integrated development environment. ...

I’m a proud liberal arts graduate myself who, with some fumbling, ended up in the world of data analytics. It may sound odd, but I never fancied myself much of a “math person,” and I still love to explore the world through the arts and qualitative methods. I still ...

R and Python, the “dynamic duo” of data science, are both free, open-source programming languages. That means that there’s no “vendor” in the sense that, say, Microsoft owns Excel. This can make getting started with these programs a little trickier: there are several ways to install them, often multi-step, ...

I hate the way files are run in a camera. While it was cool to learn for this post that DSCN stands for “Digital Still Capture – Nikon,” it means nothing to me! For this post, I will be renaming the files that I took from Worden Ledges into a more “...