Before coming to TCU, I worked as a data analyst for the Church Pension Group, which manages the retirement funds and provides other financial services for the Episcopal Church. I was part of a small research group that completed both internal and public-facing studies using the company’s data. You ... [Read more...]

This past week, the good people at RStudio advertised over Twitter the release of htmlwidgets for R, a project in collaboration with rCharts wizards Ramnath Vaidyanathan and Kenton Russell. The packages showcased are incredible; I was particularly intrigued by the dygraphs package, which creates interactive time-series charts. Aside from maps, ... [Read more...]

I frequently come across criticisms of PowerPoint as a presentation tool, which is interesting to me given the ubiquity of its use across industries. When I worked as a data analyst prior to coming to TCU, I frequently prepared PowerPoints using a company template for my boss’s presentations or ... [Read more...]

When covering Russia and the former republics of the USSR in World Regional Geography, a key part of my material addresses the issues that some of these countries have had in their transitions from centralized to market economies. Some of these countries experienced dramatic demographic shifts after the dissolution of ... [Read more...]

Please note: some NVD3 charts are performing very slowly in the latest version of Google Chrome at the moment; see this GitHub issue. As such, this post is best viewed in other browsers. I recently came across this really interesting post from Ben Jones that explores the history and future ... [Read more...]

I find population pyramids to be very effective teaching tools. In short, a population pyramid is a type of chart that shows the population size of different age cohorts on the x-axis, with gender usually displayed back-to-back to create the shape of a “pyramid.” It is used to illustrate a ... [Read more...]

Over the last month or so, I’ve been working a lot with Plotly to visualize data for my World Regional Geography course. Plotly is a web-based service that allows for the creation of interactive, D3-based visualizations that can be easily shared. Visualizations are deployed and hosted on Plotly’... [Read more...]