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Tuesday, June 28 • 2:12pm - 2:30pm
FiveThirtyEight's data journalism workflow with R

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FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism site that uses R extensively for charts, stories, and interactives. We’ve used R for stories covering: p-hacking in nutrition science; how Uber is affecting New York City taxis; workers in minimum-wage jobs; the frequency of terrorism in Europe; the pitfalls in political polling; and many, many more.

R is used in every step of the data journalism process: for cleaning and processing data, for exploratory graphing and statistical analysis, for models deploying in real time as and to create publishable data visualizations. We write R code to underpin several of our popular interactives, as well, like the Facebook Primary and our historical Elo ratings of NBA and NFL teams. Heck, we’ve even styled a custom ggplot2 theme. We even use R code on long-term investigative projects.

In this presentation, I’ll walk through how cutting-edge, data-oriented newsrooms like FiveThirtyEight use R by profiling a series of already-published stories and projects. I’ll explain our use of R for chart-making in sports and politics stories; for the data analysis behind economics and science feature pieces; and for production-worthy interactives.
Moderators
avatar for Torben Tvedebrink

Torben Tvedebrink

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aalborg University
I'm a statistician working in the area of forensic genetics. R is a core part of my teaching and research. I was the chair of the local organising committee for useR! 2015 in Aalborg, and part of the programme committee for useR! 2016 in Stanford.

Speakers
avatar for Andrew Flowers

Andrew Flowers

Quantitative Editor, FiveThirtyEight
As the quantitative editor of FiveThirtyEight, I write stories about a variety of topics -- economics, politics, sports -- while also doing data science tasks for other staff writers. Before starting at FiveThirtyEight in 2013, I was at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Tuesday June 28, 2016 2:12pm - 2:30pm PDT
McCaw Hall
  Contributed talk, Kaleidoscope

Attendees (266)