I received an out-of-band question on the use of %% in my CDC FluView post, and took the opportunity to address it in a broader, public fashion. Anyone using R knows that the two most common methods of assignment are the venerable (and sensible) left arrow [Read more...]

I’ve updated my metricsgraphics package to version 0.7. The core MetricsGraphics JavaScript library has been updated to version 2.1.0 (from 1.1.0). Two blog-worthy features since releasing version 0.5 are mjs_grid (which is a grid.arrange-like equivalent for metricsgraphics plots and mjs_add_rollover which lets you add your own custom rollover text ... [Read more...]

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Mozilla released the MetricsGraphics.js library back in November of 2014 (gh repo) and was greeted with great fanfare. It’s primary focus is on crisp, clean layouts for interactive time-series data, but they have support for other chart types as well (though said support is far from comprehensive). I had ... [Read more...]

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I and @awpiii were trading news about the power outages in Maine & New Hampshire last night and he tweeted the link to the @PSNH Outage Map. As if the Bing Maps tiles weren’t bad enough, the use of a categorical color scale instead of a sequential one[1] caused sufficient ... [Read more...]

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In a previous post we looked at how to use D3 TopoJSON files with R and make some very D3-esque maps. I mentioned that one thing missing was moving Alaska & Hawaii a bit closer to the continental United States and this post shows you how to do that. The ... [Read more...]

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Markus Gessman (@MarkusGesmann) did a beautiful job Visualising the seasonality of Atlantic windstorms using small multiples, which was inspired by both a post by Arthur Charpentier (@freakonometrics) on using Markov spatial processes to “generate” hurricanes—which was tweaked a bit by Robert Grant (@robertstats)—and Gaston Sanchez‘s Visualizing Hurricane ... [Read more...]

When I used one of the Scotland TopoJSON files for a recent post, it really hit me just how much D3 cartography envy I had/have as an R user. Don’t get me wrong, I can conjure up D3 maps pretty well [1] [2] and the utility of an interactive map ... [Read more...]

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The BBC did a pretty good job live tracking the Scotland secession vote, but I really didn’t like the color scheme they chose and decided to use the final tally site as the basis for another tutorial using the tools from the Hadleyverse and taking advantage of the fact ... [Read more...]

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Over on the Data Driven Security Blog there’s a post on how to use Rcpp to interface with an external library (in this case ldns for DNS lookups). It builds on another post which uses system() to make a call to dig to lookup DNS TXT records. The core ... [Read more...]

I had no intention to blog this, but @jayjacobs convinced me otherwise. I was curious about the recent (end of March, 2014) California earthquake “storm” and did a quick plot for “fun” and personal use using ggmap/ggplot. I used data from the Southern California Earthquake Center (that I cleaned up ... [Read more...]

Andy Kirk (@visualisingdata) & Lynn Cherny (@arnicas) tweeted about the Guardian Word Count service/archive site, lamenting the lack of visualizations: Want to know num of words written in each day's Guardian paper by section + approx reading time? http://t.co/wP4W1EzUsx via @bengoldacre— Andy Kirk (@visualisingdata) March 15, 2014 This ... [Read more...]

I shot a quick post over at the Data Driven Security blog explaining how to separate Twitter data gathering from R code via the Ruby t (github repo) command. Using t frees R code from having to be a Twitter processor and lets the analyst focus on analysis and visualization, ... [Read more...]