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cborstell.bsky.social
Calle Börstell
@cborstell.bsky.social
1.8K followers 480 following 220 posts
Linguist at the University of Bergen 🇳🇴

#SignLanguages, #linguistics, #RStats & #dataviz
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cborstell.bsky.social
This was such a cool map animation of Germany that I had to try to make one for Sweden! But with only ≈2000 towns, so some sparsely populated areas don't show so well. #ggplot2
November 24, 2025 at 2:17 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Smeared charcoal with #ggplot2
A grayscale picture of a bearded man's face in two rows and three columns. Each panel from top left to bottom right gets progressively more smeared looking
November 17, 2025 at 9:59 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Elementary, my dear Watson
#TidyTuesday

While the full phrase is never there (see also "Luke, I am your father" & "Play it again, Sam"), you can find "My dear Watson" multiple times across the Sherlock Holmes novels – but which lines? 🔎📖

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#r4ds #DataViz #ggplot2
A chart with the title "My dear Watson ..." and subtitle caption "In the four canonical Sherlock Holmes novels, the phrase “My dear Watson” occurs 15 times — 10 times in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"; not even once in "A Study in Scarlet". In the panel below, each square tile (■) represents a line of text — in chronological order — with the highlighted tiles showing the location of the famous phrase in each of the novels." Each highlighted tile representing an occurrence of the phrase is marked with a magnifying glass and a path line tracing the chronological order of phrases across books. Data: {sherlock} via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, ggview, marquee}; Visualization: C. Börstell
November 17, 2025 at 9:45 AM
cborstell.bsky.social
#TidyTuesday in the style of Chartle showing estimated incidence of TB

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#R4DS #DataViz
A line chart in the style of Chartle (a statistics guessing game) on a dark gray background with light gray/white text and lines, showing "Estimated incidence of tuberculosis per 100 000 population". One line is highlighted in coral red, showing the change for Marshall Islands from 2012 to 2023, with a huge surge from around 400/100k to well over 1000/100k in 2018. Data: World Health Organization via {getTBinR} and Sam Abbott via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, scales}; Visualization: C. Börstell
November 10, 2025 at 9:48 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Purrr is great and while I can still struggle with remembering the exact behavior of map functions, {purrr} is definitely becoming a staple for my own coding
Bar chart showing proportion of my R files that call {purrr} functions, showing an increase from 0% in 2020 to 30% in 2025
November 4, 2025 at 2:45 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Flint water samples #TidyTuesday

Bootstrapped water samples for estimating proportion of samples with dangerous levels of lead

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2
A plot with the title "Lead concentration in Flint water samples in 2015", consisting of a distribution plot (left) and a map of Michigan with Flint marked, with a water pipe coming out of Flint ending in a faucet emoji. The subtitle contains a longer text explaining "In 2015, the Michigan Department of Environment (MDEQ) collected 71 water samples in Flint to evaluate the concentration of poisonous lead in the drinking water. The Lead and Copper Rule posits that if more than 10% of samples are above 15 parts per billion (ppb), action is required by officials. The MDEQ originally excluded two samples with high readings, thus resulting in below-threshold readings overall. Suspicious of the results, a citizen science project coordinated by Prof. Marc Edwards and colleagues at Virginia Tech collected 271 new samples, which pointed to generally higher levels of lead concentration than the official MDEQ data had suggested. The plot below shows the distribution of samples in relation to the 10% threshold when each dataset is resampled 10,000 times using bootstrapping (the MDEQ data bootstrapped both with and without the samples originally excluded). When including the originally excluded samples, both datasets would indicate that the Flint drinking water is likely to contain dangerous levels of lead at a rate which would require official action for public safety. In 2014, changes made to the water supply source in Flint, Michigan resulted in a public health crisis with many residents being exposed to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water. Data: MDEQ & Virginia Tech in Loux & Gibson (2018) via TidyTuesday | Packages: {tidyverse, ggarrow, ggdist, marquee, patchwork, raturalearth, rsample, scales}| Visualization: C. Börstell"
November 3, 2025 at 3:23 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
library(ggplot2)
ggplot() +
geom_density(data=data.frame(x=rnorm(1e5)),aes(x))+
geom_line(data=data.frame(x =-5:5,y=cos(-5:5)/100),aes(x,y))+
annotate("point",x=c(-.3,0,.3),y=c(.3,.25,.3),size=3) +
ggtitle("Happy Halloween")+
theme_void(base_family="Rubik Wet Paint")

#RStats #ggplot2
A density plot with added eyes and mouth to resemble a ghost and a title saying Happy Halloween in a spooky font
October 31, 2025 at 11:16 AM
cborstell.bsky.social
Friday night early #TidyTuesday of British Literary Prizes.

Wanted it as a bookshelf, made it into a bookshelf 📚

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#R4DS #DataViz
A plot with the title "British Literary Prizes (1991-2022): Proportion of women & non-binary authors among literary prize recipients over time". The plot is designed to resemble a bookcase, with each 5-year time period from 1991 to 2022 featured as a single shelf, and books representing individual prize recipients. Women and non-binary winners are color coded pink-ish and light blue-ish, respectively. Women and non-binary authors were in the minority until 2010–2014 and have constituted about half of the winners since then. Data: Post45 Data Collective via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, marquee}; Visualization: C. Börstell.
October 24, 2025 at 10:28 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Since I have most of my peer reviews saved, I wanted to see some quick stats on the word length of reviews. I suspected they had gotten shorter over time, but it seems less than I thought.
A scatter plot with the title "Number of words in my peer reviews of original and revised article submissions", with points shown either as red squares (original) or gold circles (revised), spanning from late 2017 to late 2025, with about 4 to 8 data points per year and most points falling between 500 and 3000 words (revised manuscript reviews somewhat lower).
October 21, 2025 at 2:16 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Playing around with subsampling and color tweaking in #RStats and #ggplot2

Ended up with this painting-like rendering of a photo of mine from 2019 🏔🖼
A photo of twin mountains in the distance under a large cloud on an otherwise blue sky, beyond green lands. The image is pixelated in a way that resembles an oil painting.
October 21, 2025 at 12:28 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
UK weather data #TidyTuesday

Temperature changes over time and some individual temperature extremes highlighted on map
🌡🇬🇧

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#DataViz ##ggplot2
A line chart showing temperature changes (daily min and max readings) from 22 weather stations across the UK. The line charts include model fit lines showing average temperatures across stations over time (1970 to 2024), showing the estimated average increase at the right margin (about +1.5 degrees Celsius). On the right of the line chart, there is map of the UK showing the location of each weather station. Four of them are marked with annotations showing the highest (Cambridge, 2008) and lowest (Newton Rigg, 2010) monthly means and the hottest January (Yeovilton, 1990) and coldest July (Lerwick, 1993). Data: UK Met Office via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, geomtextpath, ggarrow, ggtext, glue, rnaturalearth, scales}; Visualization: C. Börstell.
October 20, 2025 at 7:30 AM
cborstell.bsky.social
There is something schematic about the two-handed forms for plurals, such that different participants can choose different gestures for the same meaning, but nonetheless involving an iconic plural mapping onto the two hands.
#iconicity
Two gesture sequences in photos of a white man with a dark sweater (head is censored by a black circle). Both show a gesture form produced for the meaning 'combine', with the top image showing the two hands collecting items from multiple sources and moving to a single spot and the bottom image showing the gesturer presenting each hand and then moving them towards each other in front of the torso, finally contacting with intermeshed fingers.
October 16, 2025 at 2:01 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
A small sample (n=5) of non-signers were asked produce silent gestures for 100 concepts (50 inherently plural; 50 frequency-matched controls).

They all show a preference for two-handed forms for plural items.
A bar chart showing the distribution of one- vs. two-handed gestures for target (81% two-handed) and control (55% two-handed) items. Next to it, the equivalent bar charts for each participant shows that the pattern is consistent across all of them.
October 16, 2025 at 2:01 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
World Food Day #TidyTuesday

FAO's data on moderate/severe food insecurity across areas of Europe 🌍

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...
A plot showing the "Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population of European areas (Northern, Eastern, Western, Southern)" as line charts from 2014 to 2024. Annual percentages (lines) and confidence intervals (ribbons) — Dotted lines show European average. Data: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Packages: {tidyverse, ggtext, patchwork, rnaturalearth, scales}; Visualization: C. Börstell. Next to each line chart is a map of Europe with the relevant countries (of the area) filled in with a color coding.
October 14, 2025 at 12:27 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
In 2017, I collected a bunch of ratings for a project. The participants were a messy group and the survey tool and design were not ideal, so I always wanted to recollect better data with a better experimental design.

I just did. Seems like the old ratings were pretty solid after all.
A scatter plot on a white background with blue dots clearly along a linear correlation line between x and y axes
October 12, 2025 at 8:02 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Euroleague Basketball #TidyTuesday

A mini dataset, so decided to find a way to plot stadium capacity in an interesting way: went with points along the trajectory of a basketball shot! Swoosh! 🏀

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#R4DS #DataViz
A plot that says Euroleague Basketball teams by stadium capacity on a offwhite background and black/gray text. Each data point is plotted as a basketball (emoji) and text label with the name of the team(s) playing at the arena, along a parabola simulating the trajectory of a basketball shot towards a schematic basketball hoop located in the bottom right corner. A caption reads: "There are 20 teams in Euroleague Basketball, playing at 19 unique arenas with a median capacity of 12,700 spectators. The biggest arena by capacity is Belgrade Arena which hosts the teams Crvena zvezda Meridianbet and Partizan and seats up to 18,386 people. The smallest arena is Salle Gaston Médecin which hosts Monaco and has a capacity of 5,000. Data: EuroLeague & Wikipedia via {TidyTuesday}; Packages: {tidyverse, ggrepel, ggtext, glue, scales} ; Visualization: C. Börstell."
October 6, 2025 at 1:06 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
I just wanted to simulate the Monty Hall problem, but couldn't get why the host would sometimes pick the door that the contestant had already chosen

🚪🐐🚪🐐🚪🚗
Line chart showing a simulation of the Monty Hall problem. Two lines representing the strategies stay vs switch quickly converge around the ⅔ and ⅓ probabilities of winning the car, respectively
October 4, 2025 at 9:56 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Something like this!

Tweaked the calculation to something I had originally intended and included 3-letter endings only.

–arp is very Skåne

I like the distribution of the –red/–röd/–ryd endings, of the same origin

Code: github.com/borstell/maps
A map of Sweden in 10 different panels, each showing the log odds frequency of different 3-letter place name endings in various shades of red (darker means higher prevalence; gray means no data).
October 4, 2025 at 9:28 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
It's super cool!

I used it for a bonus part TidyTuesday two years ago, making a tune out of Taylor Swift song data, saved as an mp3. Spoiler: the tune wasn't/isn't very good!

github.com/borstell/tid...
A graphic in the style of a yellowish page of sheet music. Title says "Taylor's Albums (melodized)". On the right, each album is represented by a line of sheet music. On the left, the text reads: "Each album as a single line of sheet music. The key of each track as a single note. Each note's duration as the relative track duration (z scored) across all albums."
October 3, 2025 at 9:24 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Distributions of endings in Swedish place names

#RStats #DataViz
A map of Sweden in 10 different panels, each showing the proportional frequency of different place name endings in various shades of blue
October 1, 2025 at 3:11 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
I partially contributed to this week's #TidyTuesday dataset of crane observations at the lake Hornborgasjön, 🇸🇪

I made a minimalist plot of observation maxima – earlier over time – in the style of written notes.

{magick} magic for images!

Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

#R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2
A data visualization in the style of handwritten/-drawn notes on a piece of paper. Title reads "Cranes at Lake Hornborgasjön: Observations of cranes at the Swedish lake peak earlier over time". The graph shows ridgelines along dates from mid-March to end of April (x-axis) across the years 1994 to 2024 (y-axis). The first date each year where that year's maximum number of observations was reached is marked with a little handdrawn X on the year ridgelines. Across all years, there are lines showing the mean and median values for first max observations across years down the middle. X'es are generally farther to the right in early years (i.e. later in the spring) and farther to the left in more recent years (earlier in the spring). In the plot margins, there are embedded images of cranes in flight. Data: "Transtatistik", Naturum Hornborgasjön via TidyTuesday; Image: Gllawm, Wikimedia Commons curid=147233798; Packages: {tidyverse, magick}; Visualization: C. Börstell
September 29, 2025 at 1:59 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
And it's particularly sign languages in the Southern Hemisphere that have been added to the Glottolog database in the past 8 years.
September 23, 2025 at 3:10 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
Because sign language linguistics is a young field, many sign languages were undocumented for a long time, and still are.

In fact, in Glottolog, the "sign language" category is in the top with regard to the increase in number of documented languages across version releases.
A line chart with the title "Cumulative increase of documented languages by "family"/grouping across releases of Glottolog: only showing families with 10 or more languages". It shows the cumulative increase over time with releases of the Glottolog language database. "Sign languages" is highlighted in a turquoise line, steadily increasing, having increased by around 26% from version 3.1 to version 5.2.
September 23, 2025 at 3:10 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
In the Glottolog language database, there are currently 227 different sign languages documented, and they are found all around the globe!
A map showing the distribution of the 227 sign languages documented in Glottolog 5.2 (only 224 languages shown as 3 are missing coordinates). The languages are shown as turquoise dots, distributed across all continents.
September 23, 2025 at 3:10 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
It's the #InternationalDayOfSignLanguages!

The GIF below shows a commonly used international sign for 'sign language'. But is there only a single, universal sign language? Of course not, there are many!

#Linguistics
September 23, 2025 at 3:10 PM