Posts

Imagine a world where your every online utterance is subject to censorship by powerful tech companies and governmental entities. This is the reality that we may soon face if attempts to roll back Section 230 protections are successful.

State administrative data is a valuable resource for identifying New Jersey communities impacted by the opiate crisis. In this post I present some initial results from 3 years of data collected under a state Attorney General’s Office directive.

Despite the state’s progress on expansion of adult recreational use and medical cannabis, one third of New Jersey counties lack access to even a single dispensary. This post presents a spatial analysis of New Jersey’s medical cannabis dispensary focusing how far residents must travel to obtain cannabis in the state.

Using New Jersey’s official state geocoding service and related APIs just got a lot easier! This post introduces {njgeo}, a new package for R that simplifies working with New Jersey-specific spatial datasets.

New Jersey’s new congressional districts have been finalized by the New Jersey Congressional Redistricting Commission. This post presents an interactive visualization of the new boundaries that will take effect beginning with the new election cycle for the state’s 12 congressional districts.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many public agencies are failing to adequately share data with the public. Given the lack of effectiveness of existing state policy to open up administrative data, this post proposes the development of a new open data law to create a policy mandate for sharing data with the public.

Social media is a powerful tool for mining public opinion. This post presents a basic sentiment analysis of a collection of tweets sent about the two candidates for the 2021 New Jersey governor’s race.

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool for automating workflows using the GitHub platform. This post presents an example of using GitHub actions to automatically run a web scraper in R using the {rvest} package and commit the results to a repository to automatically update a CSV with structured data pulled from the web.

Working with New Jersey-specific motor vehicle crash data can generate valuable insights for researchers and transportation planners, but finding it requires digging through government websites and manually cleaning the data. This post introduces {njtr1}, a new R package that automates the acquisition and cleaning of motor vehicle crash data published by the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

In this post I will explore how New Jersey compares to neighboring states in terms of the granularity, format and accessibility of raw data about COVID-19 cases and deaths made available to the public during the pandemic’s outbreak in 2020.