Blog

Data science explorations, TidyTuesday contributions, and the occasional deep-dive into topics I find interesting. This is where I scratch the itch.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of my employer.

Tidy Tuesday: Water Quality at Sydney Beaches

tidytuesday
R
water-quality
environmental
spatial

Exploring 34 years of beach water quality monitoring across Sydney’s coastline — how rainfall drives bacteria levels and which swim sites are most affected.

Feb 20, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: The 2026 Winter Olympics

tidytuesday
R
sports
olympics
geography

Mapping the geographic pulse of the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics — how 1,866 events spread across 13 venues and 6 host cities over 19 days.

Feb 12, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Edible Plants Database

tidytuesday
R
agriculture
botany

Exploring the growing conditions of 146 edible plant species from the GROW Observatory — which plants thrive where, and what do sunlight and temperature preferences reveal about cultivation strategies?

Feb 3, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Brazilian Companies

tidytuesday
R
economics
brazil

Exploring Brazil’s open CNPJ company registry — how capital stock distributes across legal structures, company sizes, and owner qualifications.

Jan 27, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Astronomy Picture of the Day

tidytuesday
R
astronomy
text-analysis

Mining NASA’s APOD archive (2007-2025) — what astronomical subjects capture the most attention, and how has the archive evolved over nearly two decades?

Jan 20, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Languages of Africa

tidytuesday
R
linguistics
africa

Mapping the linguistic diversity of Africa — which language families dominate, which countries are most multilingual, and how many speakers do they represent?

Jan 13, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Coffee Quality (BYOD)

tidytuesday
R
food
byod

BYOD week — revisiting the Coffee Quality Institute dataset to explore what makes a great cup of coffee, from altitude to aroma scores.

Jan 6, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Christmas Novels

tidytuesday
R
text-analysis
literature

Text mining Christmas novels from Project Gutenberg — how sentiment arcs through holiday fiction, and whether ‘spirit’ or ‘santa’ wins the word count battle.

Dec 30, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Christmas Novels

tidytuesday
R
text-analysis
literature

Text mining Christmas novels from Project Gutenberg — how sentiment arcs through holiday fiction, and whether ‘spirit’ or ‘santa’ wins the word count battle.

Dec 30, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: The Languages of the World

tidytuesday
R
linguistics
geography
endangerment

Exploring the world’s 8,000+ languages through Glottolog — which regions face the greatest endangerment, how do language families span the globe, and what patterns emerge from mapping linguistic diversity?

Dec 23, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Roundabouts Across the World

tidytuesday
R
infrastructure
geography

Exploring the global spread of roundabouts — how has construction evolved over time, which countries lead adoption, and what types of intersections are being replaced?

Dec 16, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Cars in Qatar

tidytuesday
R
automotive
economics

A modern take on the classic car dataset — exploring price, performance, and powertrain trends for vehicles available in Qatar’s 2025 market, with metric measurements and global representation.

Dec 9, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Can an Exploding Snowman Predict the Summer?

tidytuesday
R
weather
folklore
statistics

Testing Zurich’s strangest meteorological tradition — does the Boeoeg’s burn time actually correlate with summer weather? Spoiler: folklore meets regression.

Dec 2, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Statistical Performance Indicators

tidytuesday
R
governance
world-bank

How well do countries manage their statistical systems? Exploring the World Bank’s SPI data to see which pillars lag, how income tracks with data quality, and which regions are improving fastest.

Nov 25, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: The Complete Sherlock Holmes

tidytuesday
R
text-analysis
literature

A text analysis of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon — exploring sentence patterns, story lengths, and the linguistic fingerprints that distinguish Watson’s narration from Holmes’s dialogue.

Nov 18, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: WHO TB Burden Data

tidytuesday
R
public-health
epidemiology

Tracking the global tuberculosis burden through WHO data — which regions carry the heaviest load, how has mortality shifted over time, and what role does HIV co-infection play?

Nov 11, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Lead in Flint Water Samples

tidytuesday
R
statistics

Analyzing the 2015 Flint lead data using ANOVA and ggstatsplot to show how censored samples masked an actionable exceedance.

Nov 4, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Selected British Literary Prizes

tidytuesday
R
literature
diversity

Three decades of British literary prize data — examining gender representation, ethnic diversity trends, and the educational backgrounds that predict literary prestige.

Oct 28, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Historic UK Meteorological Data

tidytuesday
R
climate
weather
time-series

170 years of UK weather station data — tracking how temperatures have risen, rainfall patterns have shifted, and sunshine hours have changed across Britain.

Oct 21, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: World Food Day

tidytuesday
R
food-security
global-health

Marking the FAO’s 80th anniversary with a deep dive into global food security indicators — tracking undernourishment, dietary adequacy, and food affordability across regions and time.

Oct 14, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Amazon’s Strategic Evolution Through Language

tidytuesday
R
text-analysis
time-series
corporate-strategy

Tracking Amazon’s transformation from e-commerce company to tech giant through 19 years of annual report text data

Mar 25, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Palm Trees - Vertical Stratification Across Subfamilies

tidytuesday
R
ecology
botany
functional-traits

Exploring how palm subfamilies occupy different vertical niches in tropical forests, from groundcover to canopy giants reaching 170 meters

Mar 18, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Pixar’s Critical Consensus

tidytuesday
R
film-analysis
data-visualization

Exploring how different rating systems evaluate Pixar’s 27-film catalog, from Toy Story to Elemental

Mar 11, 2025
Sean Thimons

Where the Federal Workforce Lives

R
census
geospatial
federal-workforce

Mapping which counties have the highest share of federal employees using ACS 1-year estimates

Mar 10, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Long Beach Animal Shelter Adoption Trends

tidytuesday
R
animal-welfare
time-series

Analyzing adoption patterns and outcomes from Long Beach Animal Care Services to understand how shelter outcomes have evolved over time and which animals find homes most readily.

Mar 4, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Reproductive Medicine Research

tidytuesday
R
health-equity
reproductive-health
text-analysis

Examining 13 years of academic literature on reproductive health disparities — who gets studied, which conditions receive focus, and how research framing has evolved

Feb 25, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: CDC Archived Datasets

tidytuesday
R
public health
text analysis

Exploring the metadata of 1,257 CDC datasets archived before a federal purge of LGBTQ+ and HIV-related health data.

Feb 11, 2025
Sean Thimons
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