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cborstell.bsky.social
Calle Börstell
@cborstell.bsky.social
1.7K followers 470 following 220 posts
Linguist at the University of Bergen 🇳🇴

#SignLanguages, #linguistics, #RStats & #dataviz
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Calle Börstell
fbisnath.bsky.social
Hei! Jeg ser etter norsktalere som vil gjøre et eksperiment 🔎. Du vil se bilder og norske ord og si om de er like eller ikke. Eksperimentet tar 10 minutter og du må gjøre det på PC/nettbrett. Velg ett eksperiment og del med andre nordmenn!

🔎 1: tinyurl.com/forsk1
🔎 2: tinyurl.com/forsk2

#norsk
November 12, 2025 at 2:39 PM
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
So it finally happened. I had to translate an expression from Norwegian because I couldn't retrieve it in Swedish when writing a thing (in Swedish)
November 4, 2025 at 11:25 AM
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
Maybe Don't Publish In
predatory journals
October 25, 2025 at 5:23 PM
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
Reposted by Calle Börstell
damiepak.bsky.social
Can you predict when Lou Bega's greatest hit, Mambo No. 5, was released based on the names of all the women mentioned in the song?

Weirdly yes.

yawpr.substack.com/p/project-a-...

#databs #rstats
October 21, 2025 at 8:24 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
New paper with @ryanlepic.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1515/ling....

Our previous research showed that ✨️inherently plural meanings✨️ favor two-handed signs across sign languages, now we see that hearing non-signers also produce more two-handed forms when asked to gesture plural meanings! 👐🏼
#linguistics
Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
Sign languages have been shown to favor two-handed forms to express plural meanings, and in this paper we investigate whether this pattern is similarly found in silent gestures improvised by hearing n...
doi.org
October 16, 2025 at 2:01 PM
cborstell.bsky.social
The real magic is ✨️regex✨️
October 15, 2025 at 6:46 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
Trying to debug for much longer than needed before realizing that

sample(3, 1)

is interpreted as

sample(1:3, 1)

Could not understand what the issue was, thinking it must be my own code, but finally looked at ?sample documentation... #RStats
October 4, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Calle Börstell
andrew.heiss.phd
I just learned about the `truncate` argument in {lubridate} functions, which means NO MORE HACKY paste0(year, "-01-01") code to build dates when converting years to dates in #rstats
library(lubridate) yr <- 2025 # This doesn't work ymd(yr) #> Warning message: #> All formats failed to parse. No formats found. #> [1] NA #------- # TIRED #------- # I've done this for *yeeeeears* ymd(paste0(yr, "-01-01")) #> [1] "2025-01-01" #------- # WIRED #------- # The truncated argument tells {lubridate} that it can # ignore up to 2 (in this case) formats to look for. # Ordinarily `ymd()` looks for three formats: a year, # a month, and a day. `truncated = 2` means it can skip # the month and day parts ymd(yr, truncated = 2) #> [1] "2025-01-01" ymd(c("2025", "2025-10", "2025-10-02"), truncated = 2) #> [1] "2025-01-01" "2025-10-01" "2025-10-02"
October 2, 2025 at 5:43 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
Reposted by Calle Börstell
thomasp85.com
🎨 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
October 1, 2025 at 8:10 AM
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
Reposted by Calle Börstell
jonthegeek.com
@dslc.io welcomes you to week 39 of #TidyTuesday! We're exploring Crane Observations at Lake Hornborgasjön, Sweden (1994–2024)!

📁 https://tidytues.day/2025/2025-09-30

#RStats #PyData #JuliaLang #DataViz #tidyverse #r4ds
Logo for the #TidyTuesday Project. The words TidyTuesday, A weekly data project from the Data Science Learning Community (dslc.io) overlaying a black paint splash. TidyTuesday is a weekly social data project. All are welcome to participate! Please remember to share the code used to generate your results! TidyTuesday is organized by the Data Science Learning Community. Join our Slack for free online help with R and other data-related topics, or to participate in a data-related book club! How to Participate Data is posted to social media every Monday morning. Follow the instructions in the new post for how to download the data. Explore the data, watching out for interesting relationships. We would like to emphasize that you should not draw conclusions about causation in the data. Create a visualization, a model, a shiny app, or some other piece of data-science-related output, using R or another programming language. Share your output and the code used to generate it on social media with the #TidyTuesday hashtag. Large flock of cranes gathered in a grassy field during golden hour, with some birds in flight overhead and autumn-colored vegetation in the background. Line chart showing the number of cranes per day at Lake Hornborga in Sweden during March and April from 2014-2021. Multiple gray lines represent different years, with the 2018 and 2021 seasons highlighted in blue. The chart shows crane migration patterns starting near zero in early March, building to peak numbers of 15,000-27,000 birds between March 30 and April 8 (highlighted in beige), then declining through late April. The highest recorded count was 27,300 cranes on April 3rd, 2019. Dashed lines indicate days when weather conditions made accurate counting difficult. A note explains that 2018 had unusually cold February temperatures causing later arrival. The chart is credited to Anna Thieme from Länsstyrelsen VG at https://transtat.lansstyrelsen.se/
September 29, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Calle Börstell
phkraemer.bsky.social
Since today is the #EuropeanDayOfLanguages, let's not forget that you are not required to keep your languages separate, pure, intact or in any way feel inadequate about your way of using your own language/s.
And don't let anyone take away your co-ownership of the languages you have.
September 26, 2025 at 8:03 AM
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