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Lucia Walinchus

@walinchus.bsky.social

5K followers 600 following 1.2K posts

Managing Data Editor, NBC owned stations. Public records attorney, journalist, ice hockey player/coach. Former bylines: NY Times , Washington Post, Eye on Ohio, etc. Hearts= likes OR bookmarks

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · Nov 20

According datajournalism.com, 60% of data journalists in their last survey were male. And a recent @pewresearch.org paper showed about 2/3 of "news influencers" are men.

So please share this with anyone who might be interested in broader horizons.

Representation matters!

go.bsky.app/8gob51T

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 17h

Is there a preorder link yet?

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 18h

The number 13 is considered unlucky for some people. Because Jesus died on Friday the 13th. It’s just a superstition. My grandparents got married on the 13th.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskai...

Triskaidekaphobia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 1d

What’s the book? Yeah, that feels very relevant right now.

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 1d

I came across a passage from a book noting that marriages on the 13th in NC are 40% lower than other days. Coincidentally I came across this on the 13th!

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

Oh nice. I think it would also be interesting to see how maternal age affects this. Like, if you are 40 with small children does that affect you more as you are further along in your career? Or less as you perhaps established your career before having kids?

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

Fascinating and terrifying. Are you planning to follow up with subjects later? I'd be interested to see earnings 10+ years out too.

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

I agree!

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

Feels appropriate that I should come across this passage today.

Happy anniversary to those of you who are brave.

Plumbing the marriage database led to this discovery: "Every month, on the 13th, the number of marriage ceremonies performed in North Carolina drops by 40 percent."

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

No, it’s my bad! I actually had skipped to the bottom because that’s where code usually lives. But you made it so very easy by putting it at the top! 😂

I like to follow stuff like this line by line in the code or else I usually don’t quite get it.

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

Oh thanks! Sorry I missed that.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting. Can you share the code for this?

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 2d

Also listening to Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn. (Reading Harry Potter to my son)

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

Ohhhhh so cool

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

13/13 And big thanks to @mikestucka.bsky.social and all the @ire.org folks who encouraged me to test this out. I was very against signing up for yet another social media site until I saw what it could do!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

12/13 Disclaimers! I am not employed by bluesky, nor do I know anyone who is. This is not an endorsement and I have not extensively tested how well this works. Please respect the rate limits; this prevents overwhelming the system.

docs.bsky.app/docs/advance...

Rate Limits | Bluesky

Rate limits help service providers keep the network secure. For example, by limiting the number of requests a user or bot can make in a given time period, it prevents bad actors from brute-forcing cer...

docs.bsky.app

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

11/13 This also looks cool: You can build a big selection of follower/following connections from a initial curated list of related people.

@thoughtfulnz.bsky.social

github.com/thoughtfulbl...

GitHub - thoughtfulbloke/bskyrduckplyr: Gather a network from bluesky with bskyr and duckplyr

Gather a network from bluesky with bskyr and duckplyr - thoughtfulbloke/bskyrduckplyr

github.com

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

10/13 This mostly uses the bskyr #rstats package developed by @chriskenny.bsky.social. Check out his vignettes here: github.com/christopherk...

bskyr/vignettes/gathering_data.Rmd at main · christopherkenny/bskyr

Interact with Bluesky Social. Contribute to christopherkenny/bskyr development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

9/13 If you want to copy this code, I have it here, uploaded to @github.com

github.com/walinchus/Bl...

GitHub - walinchus/Bluesky: Fun things you can do with Bluesky

Fun things you can do with Bluesky. Contribute to walinchus/Bluesky development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

8/13 This is just scratching the surface. There's a lot of really granular data here. You can have fun with this! HMU with more ideas!

example of data from the bluesky firehose

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

7/13 Another idea: let's say you want to see not just what people like, but what others are recommending to their friends.

For example, this post doesn't have many likes, but already has a lot of reposts. And so neat! I did not know this about hippos.

bsky.app/profile/jcsv...

Jens-Christian Svenning @jcsvenning.bsky.social · 5d

Interesting! Modern hippos lived in Central Europe during the last ice age 🦏🦏🦣https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/pressreleases/detail/2025-10-09-hippos-lived-in-europe-in-the-last-ice-age #megafauna

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

6/13 This is really fascinating to see the effects of time zones, and when certain news broke!

Chart showing the TF-IDF of words in certain hours

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

5/13 Idea number two: Looking at which words were important in each hour.

To do this, we are going to employ a neat little trick called TF-IDF.

Check out @juliasilge.com's work here for a full explanation but essentially: What words were important in each chunk?

www.tidytextmining.com/tfidf

3 Analyzing word and document frequency: tf-idf | Text Mining with R

A central question in text mining and natural language processing is how to quantify what a document is about. Can we do this by looking at the words that make up the document? One measure of how...

www.tidytextmining.com

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

4/13 Analysis idea number one: what comes up most often?

Here, we take out the most popular words (prepositions, etc.) and look only at the frequency of other words.

stop_words1 <- as_tibble(stopwords::stopwords("ja", source = "marimo")) %>% rename(word=value)
stop_words2 <- as_tibble(stopwords::stopwords("pt", source="snowball")) %>% rename(word=value)
stop_words <- bind_rows(stop_words,stop_words1,stop_words2)

post_words <- posts %>%
unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
anti_join(stop_words)

post_words %>%
count(word) %>%
arrange(desc(n)) %>%
slice_head( n=100)
```

Then a table: word
<chr>
n
<int>
people 297
trump 258
time 215
2025 181
prize 178
10 176
day 164
peace 163
love 153
nobel 148

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

3/13 You can't download all two billion posts, but you can download a whole lot more than you ever could scrolling. And you can use that data to look for patterns.

For example, what if we took a look at 100,000 posts from the last day?

latest_posts <-
bs_search_posts(
"*",
sort = 'latest',
since = '2025-10-10T00:00:00.000Z', #or whatever time you want the latest_posts. I didn't want to hardcode this but couldn't' figure out a way to put the time in that exact format.
until = NULL,
mentions = NULL,
author = NULL,
lang = NULL,
domain = NULL,
url = NULL,
tag = NULL,
cursor = NULL,
limit = 100000, # You will want to limit this!
user = "walinchus.bsky.social",
pass = Sys.getenv("BSKY_PASS"),
auth = bs_auth("walinchus.bsky.social", Sys.getenv("BSKY_PASS")),
clean = TRUE
)

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 5d

2/ First, you're probably thinking: why spend time doing this?

We have this embedded idea that truly great content will always rise to the top. For a detailed discussion on why not, see these.

But the short answer is: quality is part of the equation but not the whole story.
@atrubek.bsky.social

Wheel graphic showing content at the core but also user connections, functional connections, and product connections.

The Content Trap book cover by Bharat Anand

Cover of Anne Trubek's "So You want to Publish a book?"

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