The students in my summer data visualization class are finishing up their final projects this week and I’ve been answering a bunch of questions on our class Slack. Often these are relatively standard reminders of how to tinker with specific ggplot layers (chaning the colors of a legend, adding line breaks in labels, etc.), but today one student had a fascinating and tricky question that led me down a realy fun dataviz rabbit hole.

In my research, I study international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and look at how lots of different institutional and organizational factors influence INGO behavior. For instance, many authoritarian regimes have passed anti-NGO laws and engaged in other forms of legal crackdown, which has forced NGOs to change their programming strategies and their sources of funding.

As I explained in my previous blog post, in June 2023 I drove my family across the country in a 5,000-mile roundtrip odyssey from Atlanta, Georgia to just-south-of-Salt Lake City, Utah, and back again.

In a couple days, I’m going to drive across the country to Utah, my home state. I haven’t been out west with my whole family in four years—not since 2019 when we moved from Spanish Fork, Utah to Atlanta, Georgia. According to Google Maps, it’s a mere 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) through the middle of the United States and should take 28 hours, assuming no stops.

I’ve been working on converting a couple of my dissertation chapters into standalone articles, so I’ve been revisiting and improving my older R code. As part of my dissertation work, I ran a global survey of international NGOs to see how they adjust their programs and strategies when working under authoritarian legal restrictions in dictatorship.

I’ve taught a course on data visualization with R since 2017, and it’s become one of my more popular classes, especially since it’s all available asynchronously online with hours of Creative Commons-licensed videos and materials.

In The Two Towers , while talking with Eowyn, Aragorn casually mentions that he’s actually 87 years old. When Aragorn is off running for miles and miles and fighting orcs and trolls and Uruk-hai and doing all his other Lord of the Rings adventures, he hardly behaves like a regular human 87-year-old. How old is he really?

I always forget how to deal with logged values in ggplot—particularly things that use the natural log.

As a field, statistics is really bad at naming things. Take, for instance, the term “fixed effects.” In econometrics and other social science-flavored statistics, this typically refers to categorical terms in a regression model.

Downloadable cheat sheets! You can download PDF, SVG, and PNG versions of the diagrams and cheat sheets in this post, as well as the original Adobe Illustrator and InDesign files, at the bottom of this post Do whatever you want with them!