Introducing ravelRy, a new R package!
ravelRy is an R wrapper for the Ravelry.com API. Retrieve knit and crochet patterns, yarn data, author information, and shop locations by search or by a given id.…
Understanding + classifying genres using Spotify audio features
Musical genre is far from black and white - there are no hard and fast rules for classifying a given track or artist as “hard rock” vs. “folk rock,” but rather the listener knows it when they hear it. Is it possible to classify songs into broad genres?…
blink-182 Song Similarity
How do you quantify the style progression of a band over time? Over 20 years, several albums, the addition of Travis Barker and the exit of Tom DeLonge, blink-182's style has evolved as well as solidified. "The band was already heading in an artier direction on 2003’s Blink-182, and…
Dairy Queen Deserts in Minnesota
Minnesota is the state with the most Dairy Queen locations per person. What's the farthest you'd ever have to drive to reach a DQ in Minnesota? How far would you have to go to get your birthday ice cream cake or a Reese's Blizzard on a summer day? Inspired by…
Exploring the Relationship Between Dog Names and Breeds
How much does breed influence a dog's name? Do you meet more Beagles than Bulldogs named "Bailey"? Fewer Pugs and more Dachshunds named "Nathan"? The physical characteristics and personality traits associated with each breed probably make a bigger impact on your dog's name than you think. (Why didn't you consider…
Tidy Text Mining Beer Reviews
Craft beer is a huge market. Beer reviews from fellow beer drinkers help customers navigate it. From 2013 to 2016, the craft beer industry nearly doubled in value from $14.3 to $23.5 billion. The number of craft breweries jumped from 2,768 to 5,005, and production ramped…
Halloween Episodes Get Higher IMDb Ratings
Incorporating a Halloween-themed episode into a television series season is not a new thing. In the 1960s, it started with Halloween-y television shows like Bewitched, The Addams Family, and The Twilight Zone. By the early 1970s, the idea spread to mainstream television programs with The Brady Bunch (1972), Happy Days…
Movie Trilogies Get Worse with Each Film. Book Trilogies Get Better.
Trilogies are common in sci-fi and fantasy books and movies, fitting nicely into the broad story template known as the hero's journey, where a central character goes on an adventure, wins a victory, and comes home changed. "If you make a trilogy, the whole point is to get to…
Less Than 10% of State Troopers are Women
Women make up just 39% of speaking roles on television and 32% in movies, according to recently released research by the San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. Of those roles, male characters are significantly more likely to be seen working (about 60%…
Actors and Movies with the Most Dialogue
Which movies and characters have the most dialogue? Last April, Polygraph complied and analyzed 2,000 screenplays to study gender in film dialogue. This analysis uses their summary dataset (for each movie: its characters, the number of words they spoke, their age, and gender) paired with data scraped from IMDb…