Welcome
The Mass. Numbers blog began in November of 2012 with a post comparing Elizabeth Warren’s win over Scott Brown to Martha Coakley’s 2010 loss, observing that Warren’s largest gains came in working class cities like Holyoke, Lawrence, Chelsea, and Brockton.
Some of the things that enabled posts like these were easily accessible fine-grained election results and a nice tool for creating interactive maps: Google Fusion Tables. As you might have seen by clicking on the first post, Google stopped supporting Google Fusion Tables in 2019.
This new version of the Mass. Numbers blog is enabled by some other new tools. The technologies of Rmarkdown, Distill, and GitHub Pages allow for creating data-driven blog posts that can be compiled into nice looking web pages, but also allow for including all of the data and analysis that appear in the post. This is exciting because it reduces the number of steps between analysis and publishing a result, but also because it promotes transparency, open data journalism, and reproducible data science.
If you read a post on this blog and are curious about how the analysis was done, you can look at the linked GitHub repository and see the .Rmd source of the post and the referenced data, checked in and versioned in the repository.
One other shout-out goes to the tmap mapping library that does Google Fusion Tables one better by making it easy to create data driven maps, both static maps and interactive maps, with a simple configuration option. The fact that I can create the maps completely with code allows for a great deal of automation, reducing the amount of manual work to create a map, and resulting in something that is documented and reproducible.
I am guessing that most readers of this blog are interested in the political analysis and data visualizations, but I felt that it made sense to explain the evolution of the technology behind this writing and to help others who are interested in reproducing the results, or want to take the analysis in another direction.
I am interested in your feedback. You can send me feedback through my @bwbensonjr twitter, or using the email address with username brent and the domain of this website.