Hack Session for NYTimes Dialect Map Visualization, Sponsored by OReilly Strata

Speaker:
Vivian Zhang is Co-Founder & CTO of Supstat Inc, a Statistical Consulting firm of top Data Scientists. Vivian is a data scientist who has been devoted to the analytics industry and the development and use of data technologies for several years. You can follow her on Twitter at @vivian_zhang @SupStat @nycdatasci  or #nycdatasci

Previously:
Josh Katz, Graphics Editor at The New York Times, talked on June 10 to discuss one of his projects, the “Dialect Map“.  He discussed how spatial statistics, data visualization and information design all came together.(See blog post and video)

The Dialect Map project was the Times’ most popular content of the entire year of 2013. From the survey results, Josh created a series of maps depicting regional dialect variation in the US, which set off a sensation on the Internet and in popular media. From this, he developed the New York Times’ dialect quiz, turning what began as an exercise in spatial statistics and data visualization into some of the most-viewed content in NYT history.

In his talk, Josh delved into the background and development of the dialect maps and quiz–the story in general, as well as the math behind them. He talked about how data visualization and statistics could be used to illustrate the hidden contours of our world, extricating narrative from numbers and turning data into stories.

This Session:
Vivian will tell you all you should know about choropleth map in R to make Dialect map. We will start from the data scraping step to build the database of the survey, then we will march to the shiny development including functions for map plotting. Finally we will establish a fully developed shiny application demonstrating the dialect map project.

Desktop Recording: 

[youtube]http://youtu.be/pyBHo_8euvE[/youtube]