2023
Geocode address text strings using `tidygeocoder`
Deriving coordinates from a string of text that represents a physical location on Earth is a common geo data processing task. A usual use case would be an address question…
Faceting1 is probably the most distinctive feature that defined the early success and wide adoption of ggplot2. Small-multiples are often a great dataviz choice.2 But one common problem is when your panels for the subsets of data requite vastly different amount of space. By default the panels in faceted ggplots are all of the same…
Easily re-using self-written functions: the power of gist + code snippet duo
Quite often data processing or analysis needs bring us to write own functions. Sometimes these self-defined functions are only meaningful and useful within a…
The easiest way to radically improve map aesthetics
Since R community developed brilliant tools to deal with…
2022
Were there too many unlikely results at the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar?
FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar saw many surprising results. In fact, too many – some would argue. From the unbelievable loss of Argentina to Saudi Arabia at the very beginning…
2021
What is life expectancy? And, even more important, what it isn't
It really is a remarkable achievement and maybe a lot of luck that the world mundanely operates with such a complex indicator as life…
2020
Show all data in the background of your faceted ggplot
One of the game-changing features of ggplot2 was the ease with which one can explore the dimensions of the data using small multiples.1 There is a small trick that I was to share today – put all the data in background of every panel. This can considerably improve comparability of the data across the…
2019
Dotplot – the single most useful yet largely neglected dataviz type
I have to confess…
Zotero hacks: unlimited synced storage and its smooth use with rmarkdown
Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post, initially published on Russian blog platform habr.com. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times…
See you in Barcelona this summer
Have you been feeling lately that you are missing out the coolest skill-set in academia?
2018
On 28 November 2018 I presented a poster at Dutch Demography Day in Utrecht. Here it is:
sjrdata: all SCImago Journal & Country Rank data, ready for R
SCImago Journal & Country Rank provides valuable estimates of academic journals’ prestige. The data is freely available at the project website and is distributed for deeper analysis in forms of .csv and .xlsx files. I downloaded all the files and pooled…
Regional population structures at a glance
I am happy to announce that our paper is published today in The Lancet.
Deep Catalan roots: playing with stringdist
This academic year I am participating in European Doctoral School of Demography. It is a unique one-year-long training for PhD students in demography. It keeps migrating across European research centers; this year Jim Vaupel’s research group in Odense…
Tiny things can separate life into “before” and “after”. Here is one. For almost a year I’ve been daily sending mental “thank you” to Ugo who showed me how to re-organize panes in RStudio. Since then I’ve been spreading this tiny improvement so many times that I thought the tiny advise deserved a separate…
2017
For each of the data acquisition options I provide a small visualization use case.
R is an incredible tool for reproducible research. In the present series of blog posts I want to show how one can easily acquire data within an R session, documenting every…
For each of the data acquisition options I provide a small visualization use case.
Young people neither in employment nor in education and training in Europe, 2000-2016
As an example of…
Global convergence in male life expectancy at birth
In the modern history, the world has seen unprecedented decrease in human mortality – the result of the Demographic Transition. Initially, the improvements occurred only in…
Accelerating ggplot2: use a canvas to speed up plots creation
Basically, this post turned out to be just a wrong, premature, and unnecessary attempt of code optimization. If you still want to have look, make sure that later you read this…
Colorcoded map: regional population structures at a glance
Data visualization is…
Evolution of ice hockey players' height: IIHF world championships 2001-2016
The 2017 Ice Hockey World Championship has started. Thus I want to share a small research on the height of ice hockey players that I did almost a year ago and pub…
Following the surprising success of my latest post, I decided to show yet another use case of the handy…
Arranging subplots with ggplot2
For my recently published paper, I produced not-so-standard figures that show the two step decomposition used in the analysis. Have a look:
Who is old? Visualizing the concept of prospective ageing with animated population pyramids
This post is about illustrating the concept of…
R, GIS, and fuzzyjoin to reconstruct demographic data for NUTS regions of Denmark
NUTS stands for the Nomenclature of Territorial Units For Statistics. The history of NUTS dates back to the beginning of 1970s, when European countries developed unified standards for systems of administrative geography. It was not until the…
30 issues of Demographic Digest - the most frequent journals
This week, the 30-th issue of my Demographic Digest was published.
Male mortality in Russia and Japan
Russia is sadly notorious for its ridiculously high adult male mortality. According to Human Mortality Database data (2010), the probability for…
Sex ratios in all countries from Human Mortality Database
Sex ratios reflect the two basic regularities of…
