Visualization

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...