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: Nearby galaxies do not hide the same kinds of nuclei

tidytuesday
R
astronomy
data-visualization
Palomar spectra show a sharp split between star-forming spiral nuclei and the LINER-heavy nuclei of early-type galaxies.
Aug 11, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Basotho wool trade

tidytuesday
R
trade
lesotho
Monthly UN Comtrade records show a trade concentrated in South Africa and China, with a persistent dip during Lesotho’s winter months.
Aug 4, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Ecotourism

tidytuesday
R
ecology
australia
weather
Gouldian finch records line up with a dry-season observation pattern, but the table records sightings, not bird abundance.
Jul 28, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Near-Death Experiences (NDERF)

tidytuesday
health
narratives
archive
The NDERF archive is best read as sensitive public self-report data, where classifications and AI-coded motifs summarize narratives without replacing them.
Jul 21, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Many Penguins

tidytuesday
penguins
biology
morphology
A compact AVONET penguin trait table uses genus, sex labels, and morphology measurements to show how small biological datasets still carry structure.
Jul 14, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: UFC Athletes and Fight Data

tidytuesday
sports
ufc
data
UFC fight and athlete tables show a sport where the highlight reel is only one layer: modern records are roughly half decisions, half finishes, wrapped in profile labels that are more vocabulary than taxonomy.
Jul 7, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Wreck Inventory of Ireland

tidytuesday
maritime
history
ireland
Inventory records turn Irish shipwrecks into a coastline-shaped archive of vessel types, dates, and places of loss.
Jun 30, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Papal Encyclicals and Technological Revolutions

tidytuesday
R
text-analysis
religion
history
Comparing two papal encyclicals written 135 years apart — one confronting the Industrial Revolution, the other confronting artificial intelligence — through paragraph structure, scripture references, and the longer history of papal communication.
Jun 23, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: UK Baby Names

tidytuesday
R
names
culture
uk
How fast did Bridgerton rewrite the English nursery? Tracking Daphne, Eloise, Penelope and friends against the wider question of name diversity across England & Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.
Jun 16, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Films Based on Video Games

tidytuesday
R
film
video games
reviews
Tracking three decades of video game adaptations from the Uwe Boll trough to the Super Mario Bros. Movie surge.
Jun 9, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: European Parenting Leave Policies

tidytuesday
R
policy
europe
labor
Half a century of paid parental leave entitlements across 21 European countries — who treats new parents most generously, and how the policy mix has shifted from short maternity windows to long shared parental terms.
Jun 2, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Sustainable Energy for All

tidytuesday
R
energy
sustainability
time-series
Tracking the pre-2010 rise of solar and wind in the global renewable mix using the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) country-level series.
May 26, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: State of Crossref metadata by member country

tidytuesday
R
scholarly-communication
metadata
open-science
Tracing seven years of the Research Nexus — how regions populated Crossref metadata with ORCIDs, RORs, references, abstracts, and funder identifiers from 2018 to 2026.
May 19, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Twinned Cities

tidytuesday
R
geography
urban
Mapping the geography of friendship — which continents send the most twin-city relationships to one another, and which countries are the most prolific pairing partners.
May 12, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Italian Industrial Production

tidytuesday
R
history
economics
Italy
One hundred and twenty years of Italian industrialization — reading war, recovery, and the economic miracle through production records.
May 5, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: US Agricultural Tariffs

tidytuesday
R
trade
economics
agriculture
USITC tariff data, 1989–2025 — what trade agreements actually do to the cost of importing food into the United States.
Apr 28, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Global Health Spending

tidytuesday
R
health
economics
global development
WHO Global Health Expenditure data — and the stubborn divide in who pays the bill for health care.
Apr 21, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Bird Sightings at Sea

tidytuesday
R
birds
ecology
ocean
Which Southern Ocean seabirds chase ships, and which ones just fly on by? A look at three decades of pelagic bird observations from research vessels in the Australasian seas.
Apr 14, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Repair Cafes Worldwide

tidytuesday
R
sustainability
repair
Exploring repair success rates and failure modes across product categories at repair cafes worldwide.
Apr 7, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Coastal Ocean Temperature by Depth

tidytuesday
R
oceanography
climate
Exploring vertical temperature profiles in Lunenburg County’s coastal waters.
Apr 2, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: One Million Digits of Pi

tidytuesday
R
mathematics
statistics
Are pi’s digits truly random? Exploring digit frequency, uniformity tests, and convergence across one million decimal places.
Mar 24, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: The Geography of Norwegian Fish Mortality

tidytuesday
R
aquaculture
norway
ggridges
Where are Norway’s farmed salmon dying? A regional deep-dive into six years of aquaculture mortality data from the Norwegian Veterinary Institute.
Mar 21, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Salmonid Mortality Data

tidytuesday
R
aquaculture
ecology
Norway
Norway raises the world’s salmon — and loses hundreds of millions of them every year. Six years of aquaculture mortality data reveal a counterintuitive seasonal rhythm and an industry operating at staggering scale.
Mar 17, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: How Likely Is “Likely”?

tidytuesday
R
linguistics
probability
cognitive-science
Mapping the fuzzy space between ‘remote chance’ and ‘will happen’ — how 5,000 people assigned numbers to probability words.
Mar 10, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Golem Grad Tortoise Data

tidytuesday
R
ecology
herpetology
wildlife
Long-term monitoring of Hermann’s tortoises in the western Balkans reveals a near-perfect relationship between body size and clutch size—and that females consistently outweigh their own shells.
Mar 3, 2026
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Science Foundation Ireland Grants Commitments

tidytuesday
R
science
funding
Ireland
Two decades of Irish science funding: mapping the €4.2B commitment from Science Foundation Ireland and the universities that built a research nation.
Feb 24, 2026
Sean Thimons

A User Guide to Working With Sean

essay
management
collaboration
A practical guide to how I work, communicate, and collaborate.
Feb 22, 2026
Sean Thimons

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: Agricultural Production Statistics in New Zealand

tidytuesday
R
agriculture
new-zealand
livestock
time-series
New Zealand’s agriculture has transformed over 90 years — sheep once outnumbered people 22-to-1 at the 1982 peak. What happened next reveals an entire economy in transition.
Feb 17, 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 10, 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: EuroLeague Basketball

tidytuesday
R
basketball
sports
europe
Mapping 37 years of EuroLeague Final Four appearances and championships to reveal basketball’s great European dynasties.
Oct 7, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Crane Observations at Lake Hornborgasjön, Sweden (1994–2024)

tidytuesday
R
nature
time-series
wildlife
ecology
Thirty years of Eurasian crane migration counts at Sweden’s most celebrated staging lake reveal a remarkable fivefold population recovery — and a 2023 fall season that rewrote the record books.
Sep 30, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: FIDE Chess Player Ratings

tidytuesday
R
chess
sports
Mapping the chess title hierarchy across 200,000+ rated players — and tracing India’s stunning rise to the top of the game.
Sep 23, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Allrecipes

tidytuesday
R
food
nutrition
cuisine
visualization
What does the macronutrient composition of recipes reveal about culinary traditions? Analyzing 2,200+ cuisine-tagged Allrecipes dishes to map the fat-carb-protein fingerprint of 35 global food cultures.
Sep 16, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Henley Passport Index Data

tidytuesday
R
geopolitics
travel
inequality
Tracking two decades of global passport power — how visa-free access has grown unevenly across regions, who has surged, and who remains trapped at the bottom.
Sep 9, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Australian Frogs

tidytuesday
R
ecology
citizen-science
australia
wildlife
Mapping the seasonal calling calendar of Australia’s frogs using 136,000 citizen-science observations from the 2023 FrogID survey.
Sep 2, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones

tidytuesday
R
music
pop-culture
historical
Seven decades of chart-toppers: how the sonic DNA of Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits has shifted from doo-wop to drill — and what the instruments that disappeared can tell us about pop culture.
Aug 26, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Scottish Munros

tidytuesday
R
mountains
Scotland
history
130 years of measuring, debating, and reclassifying Scotland’s highest peaks — tracking which mountains have made, lost, or regained Munro status across 11 official revisions of the Tables.
Aug 19, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Extreme Weather Attribution Studies

tidytuesday
R
climate
attribution
How often do climate scientists actually find a human fingerprint on extreme weather? Mapping the track record of attribution studies from 2004 to 2024 across event types, regions, and time.
Aug 12, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Income Inequality Before and After Taxes

tidytuesday
R
economics
inequality
policy
How much do taxes and transfers reshape income inequality? A cross-country look at the gap between market income and disposable income inequality.
Aug 5, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: What Have We Been Watching on Netflix?

tidytuesday
R
netflix
entertainment
streaming
Analyzing Netflix’s engagement reports from H2 2023 through H1 2025 to reveal what titles dominated global viewing—and why international content is quietly running the platform.
Jul 29, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: MTA Permanent Art Catalog

tidytuesday
R
art
new-york
transit
public-art
Four decades of permanent art in New York’s transit system — how glass came to dominate the underground gallery.
Jul 22, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: British Library Funding

tidytuesday
R
libraries
UK
funding
time-series
austerity
Twenty-six years of British Library funding reveal a slow, sustained hollowing-out of government support — one that inflation makes far more dramatic than the nominal numbers suggest.
Jul 15, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: The xkcd Color Survey Results

tidytuesday
R
color
perception
Where do ‘purple’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, ‘pink’, and ‘brown’ actually live in color space? Mapping the hex clouds people called by name in Randall Munroe’s 2010 color survey.
Jul 8, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Weekly US Gas Prices

tidytuesday
R
energy
economics
time-series
Thirty-five years at the pump: how geopolitics, recessions, and a pandemic shaped what Americans pay for gasoline.
Jul 1, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Measles Cases Across the World

tidytuesday
R
public health
epidemiology
time series
How vaccination drove measles toward elimination—and why it’s staging a comeback. A look at WHO surveillance data across six world regions from 1980 to the present.
Jun 24, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: API Specs

tidytuesday
R
apis
web
technology
openapi
Mapping the web API ecosystem through APIs.guru’s catalog — who provides the most, what categories dominate, and how modern is the spec landscape?
Jun 17, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: U.S. Judges and the historydata R Package

tidytuesday
R
history
law
demographics
politics
Two centuries of federal judicial appointments — who made them, how many, and how the face of the federal bench has slowly transformed.
Jun 10, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Project Gutenberg

tidytuesday
R
literature
history
text-analysis
A deep dive into the temporal and thematic shape of Project Gutenberg’s public domain library — revealing a collection that is, at its core, a Victorian literary time capsule.
Jun 3, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Dungeons and Dragons Monsters (2024)

tidytuesday
R
gaming
fantasy
dungeons-and-dragons
Decoding the ability score DNA of D&D 2024 SRD monsters — which creature types hit hardest, cast best, or survive the longest?
May 27, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Seismic Events at Mount Vesuvius

tidytuesday
R
geology
seismology
time-series
Twelve years of microseismicity beneath one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes — what the earthquake record tells us about Vesuvius’s restless interior.
May 13, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: NSF Grant Terminations Under the Trump Administration

tidytuesday
R
science policy
education
politics
Over a thousand NSF research grants totaling $613M were terminated in two waves in April 2025. STEM Education bore the brunt — and NSF cut more than Cruz even asked for.
May 6, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: useR! 2025 Conference Program

tidytuesday
R
conference
text-analysis
tidytext
Mining the useR! 2025 program to map the intellectual landscape of the R community: which topics dominate, how the week is structured, and what the conference schedule reveals about where R is headed.
Apr 29, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Fatal Car Crashes on 4/20

tidytuesday
R
traffic safety
public health
cannabis
epidemiology
A replication of Harper & Palayew (2019): the 4/20 cannabis holiday shows no reliable signal in fatal crash data, but July 4th does. Analytical choices matter.
Apr 22, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Base R Penguins

tidytuesday
R
ecology
penguins
isotopes
Exploring the Palmer Penguins dataset—now shipped in base R 4.5.0—through stable isotope ecology. What do carbon and nitrogen ratios reveal about species-level feeding niches in Antarctic waters?
Apr 15, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Timely and Effective Care by US State

tidytuesday
R
healthcare
public-health
emergency-medicine
Analyzing CMS data on timely and effective healthcare delivery across US states, with a focus on emergency department wait times and the wide performance gap between states.
Apr 8, 2025
Sean Thimons

Tidy Tuesday: Pokémon

tidytuesday
R
pokemon
gaming
Mapping the combat DNA of all 18 Pokémon types through normalized stat fingerprints.
Apr 1, 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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