John Russell

My favorite book for people learning R. The reward of making a great visualization brings people in faster than R4DS

#DuBoisChallenge2026 Week 4 - A comparison of black populations in Georgia in 1870 and 1880, showing some migration over 10 years during later Reconstruction.

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

Hah!

#DuBoisChallenge2026 Week 3 - just a nice little population map, done in #rstats

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

Reminds me of Stiger, Hiebert, Givvin (2017) on the ways in which VAT seems to be designed to solve a problem while ignoring the system that the problem is situated in

#DuBoisChallenge Week 2! I'll admit, I love the projection that Du Bois uses more than mine, but when I changed it on my map, my legend got distorted (maybe a job for the 'patchwork' package). Hatching to recreate the original work done using ggpattern

Code in #rstats: github.com/drjohnrussel...

Welcome to #DuboisChallenge2026 where the #dataviz community is encouraged to re-create visuals from the Paris Expo of 1900. This years theme is "Maps". This thread will introduce each image (see: github.com/ajstarks/dub...)

At what point does a misrepresentation become a lie?

It's an amazing book! It has really pushed my thinking around the tension between "just show the data" and trying to make something that is part of a data story

so many good new options!

TidyTuesday/2022/2 - Bee Colony at main · drjohnrussell/TidyTuesday Repository to store code exploring datasets for Tidy Tuesday - drjohnrussell/TidyTuesday

Code at github.com/drjohnrussel...

Inspired working through @nrennie.bsky.social's book (Chapter 4 tomorrow at @dslc.io!), so I went back to the original dataset for another perspective #TidyTuesday #rstats

This shows the change in Bee Colonies over a 5 year sample, where increases and decreases were both observed

I just finished reading Gulliver's travels for the first time and the deepest cuts that felt still a little true today definitely seemed to be around the Academy of Lagado

Interesting read! Loved this tidbit, wonder how to check it: "Canadians are drinking more tap water now than they did a decade ago"

Composite visualization showing Africa's linguistic diversity. Left: Treemap showing African languages sized by number of native speakers and colored by language family. Right: Geofaceted map of African countries showing the main languages in each country, also colored by language family. Niger–Congo (435 million native speakers, 377 languages), Afroasiatic (333 million speakers, 21 languages), and Nilo-Saharan (44 million, 69 languages) are the largest language families. Most African countries are multilingual and the 'main' language is often just one among many.

Africa has over 2 000 languages. For this week's #TidyTuesday, I tried to visualize this extraordinary diversity with a treemap and a geofaceted map

Code: github.com/gkaramanis/t...

#RStats #dataviz

Iceland looking like it is giving the canary islands some competition for tropical climates.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Hah, sorry, typed on a phone. I haven't been able to use ggview on a computer with only positron installed - it even names in the package looking for rstudio

#TidyTuesday (2025 W40)

Just love an excuse to do an animation... this map shows the location of Eurobasketball teams, with a gif highlighting the country of the team that won.

#rstats

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

#TidyTuesday (2025 W39)

Used the ggmap package to make an inset for the graph, and noticed that there seems to be two seasons of observations. Fun dataset, I'm curious whether the increase in cranes is an observer effect, or an actual increase!

#rstats

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

(e.g., perhaps more people do chess who are in their twenties, so including the whole sample pulls down the mean)

Appreciate this! The reasoning for cutting was that taking the full average would have the effect of introducing a sample size effect with different entrances into chess by age. But to your point, I wanted to make that cutting clear in the methodology.

#TidyTuesday (2025 W38)

I had heard about the age effect in chess, and wanted to see it for myself - took the top 20 chess players at each age to show how chess, like other sports, very much peaks (also, there are some old chess players still around!)

#rstats

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

This one was a really good episode

#TidyTuesday (2025 W37)

Went into cleaning mode this week, filtering out common pantry ingredients and instructions to find the most common other calls for ingredients that are given.

#rstats

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

look what you made me do

(#rstats code here gist.github.com/andrewheiss/... )

#TidyTuesday (2025 W36)

The Henley Passport index is interesting because it allows ties, which was a nice challenge for a ranking plot using the ggflags package to see which passports allow one to travel to the most countries.

#rstats

Code: github.com/drjohnrussel...

Super fun #TidyTuesday data all about frogs this week! 🐸

I decided to try to visualise the scientific names of the different frogs using a sunburst diagram 📊 Thanks to {ggiraph} - it's also interactive!

Code: github.com/nrennie/tidy...

#RStats #DataViz #ggplot2

#TidyTuesday (2025 W35)

We often think of distributions among categories, but spatial and temporal distributions are also important for exploration. It's also interesting to think, as a citizen science project, about issues of selection bias.

#rstats

Code: drjohnrussell.com/posts/2025-0...