Studio Lab

Charts that survive without color

An independent demonstration of chart encodings that do not rely on hue.

charts · accessibility · design

What collaborative filtering assumes about people

A written-up account of how user-user and item-item recommendation differ, and what each one quietly assumes about the people it is describing.

recommender-systems · notebooks

Experiments

Work run against real data to answer a question, including the runs that returned nothing useful.

Measuring local economic resilience

Independent research exploring a resilience measure that small towns could compute.

resilience · indicators · open-data

Reading a recommender notebook in the open

A published Jupyter notebook comparing three recommendation approaches, rendered as readable prose rather than a download.

notebooks · recommender-systems · reproducibility

Playground

Short pieces written to work something out, with no dataset run and no artifact at the end.

The popularity baseline was harder to beat than expected

What the recommender notebook actually showed. Tuned collaborative filtering improved on recommending the most-played titles by less than the evaluation's own noise.

recommender-systems · evaluation

Prototypes

Built artifacts that demonstrate a technique, made to be looked at rather than deployed.

What a good statistical brief does in four pages

A close reading of an NCHS mortality brief, embedded in full, as an example of publishing a document without making the reader download it blind.

evidence-communication · documents · accessibility

Taste Profile play counts

The play-count data behind the recommender comparison: what a row of it actually records, and why the extract that was modelled is the dense middle of a distribution rather than the whole of one.

datasets · recommender-systems · provenance

Works in progress

Open questions published before they are answered, with the current limit stated on each.