The New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) - the largest department of its kind in the world - is responsible for the city’s garbage-collection operation. One component of this operation is the regular emptying of 23,000+ street-level trashcans - or as they call them: “litter baskets.” DSNY offers up their geo-coded litter-basket inventory - refreshed monthly - through the NYC OpenData portal and in today’s post I’ll walk through how to create an interactive, 3D fly-over map of these litter-basket locations with the help of Mapbox’s Mapbox GL JS API in R.

I recently came across Datawrapper while checking out New York City’s COVID-19 Vaccines page and - going on appearance alone - the charts, tables, and maps (hosted & served by Datawrapper) appear attractive, responsive, and have a cohesive look. As I am always interested in checking out new visualization tools, I took the Datawrapper API (and GUI) for a spin and created the below example as a proof of concept - you can hover-and-click on the map points to read additional information:

Following full vaccination, folks have begun venturing outdoors for the first time in long while - myself included! In support of outdoor-activity planning, today’s post is going to cover forecasting national park visits for each month of 2021. Since there are 63 National Parks in the US across 30 states and two territories, I will employ the sweep package to address the scale of forecasts to be made/reviewed all while keeping the data in a tidy format.

Today’s post is a recipe for median chocolate chip cookies that’s also a ggplot chart with colored-coded text in the subtitle. The recipe is based on summary stats from 200+ recipes from eightportions.com’s “Recipe Box” data where the recipe title contains the text: “chocolate chip cookies” and the colored text was made possible with ggtext. Tl;dr: The recipe: I will briefly cover the source data, preparation, and one way to add colored text and unicode symbols ◍ to ggplot texts like caption, subtitle, title, etc.