[Work in Progress] Scraping Japanese timetables

GitHub code here This is a "making-of" piece for the other big scraping project I've done (after this one). This one dates back to early 2020, and it straight-up doesn't have an output graphic at all (at least, not yet). Text in red is all the improvements I would like to make once I'm ready …

[Work in Progress] Graphing the polls for Israel’s elections

GitHub code here It was supposed to be a quick project to get polling averages for Israel's multiple recent elections, but after getting bogged down in unsolvable problems, I remain far away from a graphic I'm satisfied with, so I figured I'd at least get a blog post out of it. The product I've got …

Depicting Three-Way Elections

https://kojisposts.shinyapps.io/three-way-elections/ App code here: https://github.com/bobidou23/elections/blob/master/three-way-elections/app.R Made a thing. Was intended to be about pre-election polling, but couldn't get it done before the election (for reasons I don't regret — I was quite invested this election, and it was better to spend every moment leading up to it knocking on doors). It's reached the minimum acceptable …

Portugal’s false majority, or the importance of allocation formulas

In last week's legislative election, the incumbent Socialist Party won a majority of seats, the second in their history. But this is not because more citizens voted for them than against them - they received 41.7% of the vote. Although Portugal uses proportional representation, many districts have few seats. It also uses the D'Hondt method …

A Map of Tokyo’s Neighbourhoods

Japan doesn't name its streets; instead, it names small subdistricts/neighbourhoods and numbers the blocks and buildings within them. I took these named neighbourhoods, grouped together similarly named ones (shaving off West, East, etc.), and got the following map. It has no functional use at all. But it gives some order to this enormous metropolis, and …

Are Multi-Party Systems Really “Unstable”?

Github code here (dataset here) Are multi-party proportional systems really less "stable" than single-party majority systems? This chart includes: 1) Government formation periods after elections and 2) Coalition crises where the government loses its majority, sometimes leading to an early election. In other words, this tries to measure the additional days without government clarity caused …

some folklore/evermore graphics

Ah, the albums that turned me off of capital letters. An updated visualization of key signatures in Taylor's albums (2018 version here). I've moved from giving minor keys their own half of the circle, to giving them different-coloured segments within the bars, mostly because some songs are difficult to classify either way. The last row …

I Tried Understanding Brazil’s Political Parties

So I knew Brazilian parties were confusing and not ideological in the way we normally imagine parties to be. I looked at all of the coalitions made for governor's races in 2018 and tried to see if there were patterns. The expectation was that left-wing parties would ally with other left-wing parties more often than …

Japan has a new government and a new opposition. Now what?

Four years into writing sporadically about Japanese politics, the overall impression is that there’s a tremendous amount of noise, a steady drumbeat of events that look interesting and impactful at first glance but turn out to have meant nothing. Bureaucratic and cabinet-level scandals are common; election days are common (there’s a general election, upper house election, …

"Conical" vs. "spiky" development

Soon afterwards, I lost all the data on my computer, which is why this particular project has stalled for the moment. I was, though, able to find the same data in another form on Human Terrain, an interactive project from The Pudding.Here are some North American metropolises (LA, SF from the east, Toronto, and NY), and then …