Visualization

Scrollytelling through a look at food prices around the world

May 2, 2022

You have gathered the needed data to support your research, check. You have made some hypotheses about what you hope to conclude, check. You have spent time cleaning the data and organizing it in a manner that permits further exploration, check. You have sliced and diced the data with your favorite data exploration software packages or techniques and created some data visualizations that you feel confident about, quadruple check! You are now armed with insights that you hope to showcase to the world, what’s next? In this article, I would like to share some tips for creating a...

Enumeration of Informal Work

March 1, 2022

The first time that I mapped out poverty statistics at a municipal scale, I was completely mind blown (figure 1). Looking at the spatial inequities from a bird’s-eye view drove my desire to find more granular data of social indicators to better understand intra-urban socioeconomic inequities. Spatial data techniques help us to find patterns and anomalies across data that improves our understanding of people’s lives in cities, raising new questions about urban infrastructure in terms of public goods provision, land-use, and access. However, finding granular socioeconomic...

A Beginner’s Guide to the Bootstrap

November 22, 2021

What is the bootstrap method?

If you take a quantitative methods course here at Berkeley, chances are that you will learn how to perform a bootstrap. As an introductory data science instructor, it’s one of my favorite topics to teach, not just because it’s a powerful and useful tool, but also because it’s incredibly intuitive. In short, the bootstrap -- also known as resampling with replacement -- allows us to generate a distribution of sample statistics given only a single sample, estimating sampling error.The name of this method...

Rural vs. Urban: Using Python to Explore Legislative Data

November 8, 2021

Before COVID-19, becoming a data scientist was never on my radar. As a policy analyst for the California Research Bureau, a legislative research and reference section of the California State Library, I’ve worked on a variety of projects and requests. For the last 8 years, my work has focused on producing timely, confidential ...

Working with Color Data: An Introduction to Colorspaces

October 19, 2021

For many of us, the colors a computer screen makes are of secondary importance: we would much rather have the screen adjust for the conditions — a bit less blue in the evening, a bit more brightness when it’s sunny — and have a crisp resolution. If the color is about right…it's good enough. For many professionals though, from photographers, to film producers, to Data Scientists, color can become an exacting and important field of study.

For a little backstory on color in general it is important to define why it’s so complex and how creating a...