Brands are essential. They live in our minds as ideas and each person constantly interacts with hundreds of brands a day, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively.

But what is their role in data science? Well given most tech is fueled by strong business brands, it is probably essential for any data scientist to have even a basic understanding of brands.

In this post, I want to explain how to do a simple brand sentiment analysis using Twitter. My focus? Robinhood, the trading app. You probably heard about the GameStop (GME) frenzy that occurred just a couple months ago where Reddit users…

Happy International Women’s Day!

In the spirit of the day, I wanted to do a post celebrating the many wonderful women of this world. In keeping with my political analytics topics, I thought it would be interesting to look at the proportion of women are in government by country, and how that has changed over the past few decades. Luckily The World bank has such a dataset, measuring the proportion of government seat’s held by women in every country throughout the world. Let’s get to it and visualize this data!

In total, I will walk you through 5 visualizations:

1. Graph…

In my last post, I demonstrated how you can create graphs and text that tell a nice story about how much the American public approved of each of the past 14 Presidents! So, how about we make the information more fun to watch?

Luckily, R can accomplish this. With the gganimate and magick
packages, GIF building is easy and effective. Let’s look at the end
result first, so I can reel you into making this for yourself.

This GIF shows Trump’s approval rating compared to the approval ratings of every president in the past 75 years in an individual one-on-one…

A few weeks ago, I tuned into an RStudio talk by John Burn-Murdoch about reporting and visualizing the COVID pandemic. As a data journalist at the Financial Times, he has been extremely influential over the past year creating well-known charts and graphics about the spread of COVID and it’s toll on the world. And it is all because his graphics tell a story.

As a consultant, I know the importance of storytelling, but doing it in programming is difficult as the story often gets lost behind the data. Still, you should always try to tell a story with your graphics…

Robinhood and his merry band of outlaws. Throughout the week that relationship was strong in the world of Wall Street and the financial markets, as the Robinhood app enabled a merry band of “Reddit bros” to challenge big institutional hedge funds at their own game — a quasi steal from the rich, give to the poor story. By offering free trading, Robinhood was the tool used by millions of every day, non-institutional retail traders to buy GME, AMC and other heavily shorted stocks to create what is termed as a short squeeze, costing the hedge funds who shorted these stocks…

Okay, you got me. Stability and Donald Trump are not two terms that are usually seen in the same sentence. But overlooking policy, events and Twitter rants, Trump’s presidency characterized a level of stability we have not seen in Presidential history in one way–Approval Ratings.

I present the chart-du-jour so to speak. Below you see the final instalment of FiveThirtyEight’s approval ratings of President Trump. What you see is a constant and consistent approval trend line between a high of about 45 and a low of 35. …

Since October, the UK’s COVID-19 strategy has been defined by the government’s Lockdown Tier system. Different regions, councils and cities have had their lockdowns change from Tier 1 — Medium Alert to the newly introduced Tier 4 — Stay At Home. Now everybody is in a national lockdown, but people all over the country continuously had trouble keeping track of what tier they were in, and what restrictions they had to abide with.

From a mapping perspective, what has this looked like? The website Election Maps UK made constantly updated maps of the different Tiers changing from October to now…

After a two month hiatus, all eyes are back on the United States for their second instalment of “Can’t Look Away Election Special,” sponsored by Georgia’s unique runoff voting system for the two open Senate seats. Well, not all eyes. Despite attempts by President Trump, Biden is still the official President-Elect, so if you are not interested in the further dynamics of the three-tiered power struggle in US politics feel free to tune out now.

As you may have heard, the winner of these elections will decide the Senate, potentially giving the Democrats full control of all three levels of…