I am Professor of Sociology at Duke University. → More about me.  

Some of my Work

  • The Ordinal Society. Harvard University Press. » overview
  • Data Visualization. Princeton University Press. » overview
  • “Fuck Nuance.” Sociological Theory 35:118-127. » pdf
  • “Seeing Like a Market.” Socio-Economic Review, 15:9-29. » pdf
  • “The Performativity of Networks.” European Journal of Sociology, 56:175–205. » pdf
  • Last Best Gifts. University of Chicago Press. » overview

Recent Writing

The Ordinal Society Site

21 December 2023

The Baby Boom Again

20 December 2023 Prompted by a local data visualization event, I revisited my old “Visualizing the Baby Boom” poster and added a few things to it. The additions are there to add a little extra context and to bring out some relevant comparisons. There are new rows showing snapshots of the country’s population pyramid every ten years between 1935 and 2015, to show the boomer cohort moving up through the population’s age distribution. Following on from some discussion on the socials with Gina C.   Continue reading…

Dorling Cartograms

6 December 2023 I was writing some examples for next semester’s dataviz class and shared one of them—a Dorling Cartogram—on the socials medias. Some people don’t like cartograms, some people do like cartograms; in conclusion, we live in a world of contrasts. Also, some people asked for the code. So here it is, fwiw, after the pictures. These are not the most polished figures, but that is kind of the point, as we go through them in class and indoctrinate students in the inflexible ideology of Cultural Marxism discuss them like reasonable people and so on.   Continue reading…

gssr Update

2 December 2023 The General Social Survey, or GSS, is one of the cornerstones of US public opinion research and one of the most-analyzed datasets in Sociology. My colleague Steve Vaisey aptly describes it as the Hubble Space Telescope of American social science. It is routinely used in research, in teaching, and as a reference point in discussions about changes in American society since the early 1970s. It is also a model of open, public data.   Continue reading…

Flipbookr for Quarto

10 August 2023 {{flipbookr}} is an R package written by Gina Reynolds. It’s very useful for teaching. It was developed for use with .Rmd files Xaringan and presently does not work with Quarto. I hacked-up a version of Flipbookr that does work with Quarto. Using it with Xaringan should be exactly the same as before. Right now it’s incomplete. I’ve just focused on getting the main user-facing function, chunk_reveal() to work. But this is also most of what the package does.   Continue reading…