aRtwork!

This week, I did something a bit different - the artwork above was made in R! The code to create the graph is actually pretty short, only taking up 28 lines. The bulk of the work was spent writing the csv containing all the polygon points and colors. I spent most of the past week doing some back end work that will pay off in the future. Namely, I set up a local clone of my repository on github and figured out how to embed Shiny applications on Squarespace.

I’d like to address something that has been nagging me for a bit. Last week, I wrote about Georgia’s special senate race. I spent a lot of time learning new packages and methods, and am happy with how the plots and majority of the post turned out. Near the end of the post, however, I made the conjecture that Doug Collins may have seen an opportunity to run against Kelly Loeffler because she was a polarizing candidate with a string of controversies surrounding her campaign. While I shared sources that generally support this position, I didn’t back it up with any sort of data or in-depth analysis. I’m not a political scientist nor am I an expert in election strategy, so in hindsight I think it was pretty irresponsible to add my uninformed opinion to the post. I’ll leave the post up unedited, since it’s important to keep a true record of what I’ve written, but moving forward, I’ll be better about writing the story the data reveals, rather than one I’d like to believe.