This is a talk organized by Chester Ismay at Reed College - and Portland R meetup folks are invited! Please join us!
Bio: Andrew Flowers is a journalist and data scientist. He was previously the quantitative editor and economics writer for FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver's data-driven news website. Before that, he was an economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He graduated with a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago. He is passionate about R, open source software, politics and basketball.
Blurb: Data journalists write stories with data and find stories in data. At FiveThirtyEight, data journalists' preferred tools are R and the tidyverse packages. R is used to find stories through exploratory analysis, web scraping and statistics; then, to tell stories, we leverage R’s powerful chart and interactive packages (like ggplot2). This talk will profile the six types of data journalism stories, motivated by: novelty, outlier, archetype, trend, debunking and forecast. As examples, several FiveThirtyEight stories or projects that used R extensively will be profiled, covering topics like: p-hacking in nutrition studies, the history of police officer shootings, how Uber is affecting New York City taxis, and what local characteristics explained Donald Trump winning the Presidency.
