R on Kailas Venkitasubramanian

Announcing nationalparkscolors - Color palettes inspired by America's National Parks

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” - John Muir

Beautiful Chord Diagrams with Flourish

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a moment in data visualization where a chart stops being a chart and becomes a conversation starter. Chord diagrams do that reliably. Whenever I’ve dropped one into a presentation or a report, someone in the room leans forward. They want to trace the lines. They want to understand what connects to what. That reaction is exactly why I keep coming back to them.

What Is a Chord Diagram?

A chord diagram is a circular visualization that shows relationships between entities. Imagine a circle divided into arcs — each arc represents a category or group. Ribbons stretch between arcs, connecting them. The width of each ribbon encodes the magnitude of the relationship: a thick ribbon means a strong or frequent connection; a thin one means the opposite.

Embracing multilingualism in data science

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Both of those efforts — reproducibility and pipelines — rest on a more basic question: which programming languages should a small research team actually use? In the previous posts of this series, I covered why reproducibility matters and how we are designing reproducible data pipelines at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. This post is about the layer underneath both.

Specifically, I want to argue that embracing multilingualism—fluency in both R and Python, rather than loyalty to one—has quietly done more for our team’s output than almost any other choice we’ve made.

Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding: How It Works and Where We Use It

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you work with administrative data long enough, you run into the same wall eventually: the dataset has everything you need except race and ethnicity. Hospital discharge records, voter files, tax records, benefits enrollment data — these are often rich with information about where people live, what services they use, and what outcomes they experience. But ask whether they capture race or ethnicity, and the answer is usually no, or inconsistently, or only in ways that aren’t usable.

Using tidycensus to Analyze ACS PUMS Data

Sun, 12 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve spent any time working with Census data, you know the drill: pull a pre-aggregated table, get median household income by county, move on. It works, and for a lot of questions, it’s exactly what you need. But sometimes the published tables just don’t cut it. What if you want to look at wage distributions for workers with specific educational credentials? Or model individual-level outcomes rather than tract-level averages? That’s where PUMS comes in — and once you start using it, it’s hard to go back.

Towards reproducible data science for community and policy research - An experiential roadmap

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On developing a reproducible data science framework and practice at the Charlotte Urban Insitute

Charlotte Regional Data Trust - Technical Operations Manual

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On how we developed the technical operations manual at the Charlotte Regional Data Trust

Make your code purr - A short intro to iterating using PURRR in R

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing ‘Purrr’

What’s programming without iterating? Purrr is a package that provides a set of tools for working with functions and vectors in R.

Built on top of the map functions (e.g., lapply(), sapply(), etc.) in base R Purrr provides a more consistent and modern syntax. Purrr is particularly useful for performing repeated operations on lists and data frames. It provides a collection of functions that make it easier to apply functions to data, iterate over lists and vectors, and manipulate data in a flexible way.

Sahyadri - Yet another Rstudio Dark theme

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Presenting Sahyadri - An RStudio theme for Syntax highlighting

Sometimes it isn’t enough to have a hundred dark themes for your text editor.So here’s one I created.

Sahyadri. Sahyadri is a mountain range that runs along the Western coast of peninsular India. The colors of this theme are inspired by monsoon forests, the incredibly diverse flora and fauna, dark undergrowth and misty slopes.

Comparison Slider for figures and images with RICV

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There is no end to all the magic you can do with R. I come across at least one nifty tool in the web everyday. RICV is one such awesome little visualization package that lets you compare plots using sliders.

Here’s a short introduction of RICV’s magic.

Get set up

Install the package from github and call the libraries you need to create visualizations. ggplot is my viz workhorse. I also call ggthemr because it lets me use the rust theme whose color palettes work nicely with this website theme :).

India Ink

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

IndiaInk is an R package project that gives ggplot color themes inspired by the national parks and landmarks of India

Advanced Visualization with R

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

Pre-requisites

Basic skills in R

Audience

UNC Charlotte Faculty and Graduate Students

Duration

Two 2-hour sessions

Date and Location

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