About

Why I do TidyTuesday, how each analysis is built, and how to reuse the code.

About

Practice in public

TidyTuesday is a weekly social data project run by the R for Data Science community. A new dataset appears every Tuesday, and anyone can make something with it and share it. This site collects what I made.

Why I do it

I’m Arun Koundinya Parasa, and I work with data for a living. Work rarely gives you a fresh dataset and an open brief every week, so TidyTuesday is where I practise: a new subject each time, a deadline that doesn’t matter, and nobody telling me which chart to make.

The early weeks are simple line and column charts in Python with plotnine. Later ones move to R and ggplot2 for things that need more control: custom backgrounds, annotated recreations of W.E.B. Du Bois’s plates, choropleth maps with sf, a racing bar chart with gganimate, and a Quarto dashboard.

How each analysis is built

  • Python weeks run inside the page. The code you see is the code that drew the chart, rendered with Quarto and Jupyter.
  • R weeks were built in R scripts and saved as images; the page shows the full script, folded, next to each chart.
  • Every page links to the TidyTuesday readme for its dataset, so you can start from the same data.

Reuse the code

All of it is on GitHub. Copy anything you find useful; a link back is appreciated. Comments are open at the bottom of each analysis if you spot a mistake or have a better idea.

Elsewhere