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Nicola Rennie

@nrennie.bsky.social

7.9K followers 830 following 740 posts

📊 Data visualisation specialist. 💻 #RStats | #Python | #D3. 🎨 Generative artist. 🏃‍♀️ Runner. Website: https://nrennie.rbind.io/ She/her. Views my own.

nrennie.rbind.io

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · Sep 11

I've written a short blog post introducing "The Art of Visualization with ggplot2"!

This book is all about the end-to-end process of creating charts with #ggplot2 📊 including data wrangling, sketching, and styling your plots!

nrennie.rbind.io/blog/art-of-...

#RStats #DataViz #TidyTuesday

Introducing The Art of Visualization with ggplot2 – Nicola Rennie

I’ve written a book! This blog post gives a brief introduction to The Art of Visualization with ggplot2, a book of data visualization case studies showing the end-to-end process of building charts, st...

nrennie.rbind.io

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 2d

I clearly had a lot of thoughts/feelings from reading Terry's blog post, so I wrote one of my own

It ended up being a bit of a stream-of-thought post but I think it captures some of my worries

benharrap.com/post/2025-10...

#statssky #episky #academicsky

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 2d

But you might find cool things down the rabbit hole...

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 2d

PS I wouldn't call using AI a "collaboration" since they can't think, nor would I call generative AI an intern for similar reasons...

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 2d

What I found in this experiment is that generative AI is good at the quick data viz tasks, but can't really do the ones that take time without a lot of extra info/prompts. Both examples here are similar to the ones I generated.

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 2d

I think if you already have a best practices document, an idea of what makes a good chart, and a style guide to follow then most of the work is already done.

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

econmaett @econmaett.github.io · 2d

Ross Ihaka: The Open-Hearted Data Hero
#rstats
www.historyofdatascience.com/ross-ihaka-t...

“R changed my opinion of humanity to some extent, to see how people are really willing to freely give of themselves and produce something larger than themselves without any thought of personal glory.”

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Ilya Kashnitsky @ikashnitsky.phd · 2d

😍 just wow ❤️
www.pechakucha.com/presentation...
Thanks to @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social I learned today of the PechaKucha presentation format — 20 slides, 20 seconds each, auto progressing 💡
So, visiting the website, I just clicked the presentation of the day button — and wow 😍

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 3d

🧵🚨

The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news.

Today our report is published!
www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

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UK’s arm’s length public bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation

Seven in ten Britons say it is important for top scientific institutions to be independent in exclusive new polling.

www.ucl.ac.uk

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 3d

Wondering if you can outsource your data viz work to ChatGPT? 📊

I tested out a few different generative AI tools, giving them prompts to visualise two different data sets. If you're interested in the results, you can read them here: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/gen-ai-...

#RStats #Python #DataViz #GenAI

Generative AI for Data Visualisation – Nicola Rennie

Can generative AI create good data visualisations? This blog post compares the performance of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini when presented with a generic request to visualise a dataset.

nrennie.rbind.io

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 3d

Yes, definitely - that's one of the points I make in the post. The point of this exercise was to see how it responds to a generic request of "can you visualise this?" (because that's often how data viz requests arrivw in practice).

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 3d

Generative AI for Data Visualisation – Nicola Rennie

Can generative AI create good data visualisations? This blog post compares the performance of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini when presented with a generic request to visualise a dataset.

nrennie.rbind.io

6 16 52

Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 4d

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 4d

Data dictionary template: osf.io/ynqcu
Project summary template: osf.io/q6g8d
Dataset level README template: osf.io/tk4cb

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Data Visualization Society @datavizsociety.bsky.social · 4d

📊 How can you turn data visualization into a community experience?

Nina Koch (@nk-yeahyeah.bsky.social) shares her insights and lessons from a fascinating, fast-paced workshop where participants co-created a datavis about their changing interests over time.

nightingaledvs.com/datavis-as-a...

Datavis as a Community Experience: How to (Not) Create a Datavis in a Group, Nightingale

Do you know individuals who seem to focus on one thing for their whole life? I’m on the opposite side of the scale.

nightingaledvs.com

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 4d

The data isn't mine. The source of the data is here: github.com/natanast/Eur... which scrapes the data from Wikipedia: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroLea...

EuroleagueBasketball/data-raw/01.R at main · natanast/EuroleagueBasketball

An R package providing data on Euroleague Basketball - natanast/EuroleagueBasketball

github.com

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 5d

Code: github.com/nrennie/tidy...

tidytuesday/2025/2025-10-07 at main · nrennie/tidytuesday

This repository contains the R, Python, D3, and Svelte code used to produce my visualisations for the #TidyTuesday challenges. - nrennie/tidytuesday

github.com

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 5d

Thanks to Natasa Anastasiadou for curating this week's #TidyTuesday data about basketball!

📊 Combined timeline and bubble chart
🏀 Basketball icons from Font Awesome and {ggtext}
🎨 Dot and text colours controlled with two different scales via {ggnewscale}

#DataViz #RStats #ggplot2

Timeline plot showing when different teams have made the final four and won EuroLeague Basketball, and a bubble chart showing stadium capacity. There seems to be no relationship between the two.

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 5d

Issue 16 of RDM Weekly is out! 📬

It includes:
- Data is Not Available Upon Request @ianhussey.mmmdata.io
- AI Generated Participants in Social Science @jamiecummins.bsky.social @science.org
- Why’s it Hard to Teach Data Cleaning? @randyau.com
and more!

rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

RDM Weekly - Issue 016

A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.

rdmweekly.substack.com

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Beautiful Public Data @beautifulpublicdata.com · 6d

✨📊 Cold War Military Slides

A reporter stumbled upon a treasure trove of Department of Defense slides from the 1970s and 1980s depicting data from missile systems, Soviet capabilities and America’s nuclear ars…

🔗

https://beautifulpublicdata.com/cold-war-military-slides

Text "MISSION AND ORGANIZATION" is overlaid on a fragmented map with a blue grid and multicolored sections.

A dynamic painting depicting U.S. Air Force and Navy missiles and aircraft in flight against a colorful sky background.

A pie chart from the 323D Flying Training Wing displays FY 1979 graduate assignments, with SAC at 46%, TAC at 36%, MAC at 15%, and other at 3%.

A pie chart from AFSC FY 80 showing the distribution of total funds managed, totaling $17.4 billion, with sections for procurement (43%), RDT&E (25%), foreign military sales (21%), and other (11%).

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 6d

I love the design of this so much! 🏀

Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Darren Macey @darrenmacey.bsky.social · 7d

Are you a student in #Scotland?

You could enter our infographic competition & win a lovely bundle of books related to maths, stats, biology & fiction by Scottish authors.
Closing date 10th October at midnight. Enter here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Please share! #MathsWeekScot

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Felicity Hannah @felicityhannah.bsky.social · 9d

This article manages to name her husband before it names… her.

Article reads:
Woman named as Archbishop of Canterbury in historic first

The 63-year-old archbishop-designate is married to Eamonn Mullally, with whom she has two children. Originally from Woking in Surrey, she was the UK's chief nursing officer from 1999 to 2004.

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 11d

🎨 Theming got a huge overhaul with the latest #ggplot2 release. In honour of that @teunbrand.bsky.social has written a comprehensive deep-dive into styling your plots, covering both old and new functionality. Grab a coffee and dive in!

#rstats

ggplot2 styling

This post discusses one function in ggplot2: `theme()`. Find out about the glamour of graphics in this deep-dive article.

www.tidyverse.org

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Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 9d

From 🇦🇺 Spring to 🇬🇧 Autumn

Photo of a tree with green leaves just starting to appear

Photo of a road lined with orange leaves from trees above

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Reposted by Nicola Rennie

Ben McCann @benmccann.com · 10d

svelte.dev/packages is now live!

It's a convenient and easily discoverable place to find a sampling of high quality packages in the ecosystem. We hope it will give confidence in the Svelte ecosystem to newcomers and help them get started more easily.

Packages • Svelte

Packages for your Svelte and SvelteKit apps

svelte.dev

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