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

Book Day

28 March 2024

Pi Day Circles

14 March 2024 Some Lissajous animations for Pi Day. Made with R, ggplot, and gganimate. And the really not very efficient code that made them: r 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 library(tidyverse) library(gganimate) library(transformr) df_base <- tibble( id = seq(1, 1000, 1), t_vals = seq(0, 2 * pi, length.   Continue reading…

A PCoA of New York City Neighborhoods and Street Tree Species

3 March 2024 Hello and welcome back to NEW YORK STREET TREE FACTS. Thank you for subscribing. This is all I do now. Following on from previous dabbling, I went and did some metric scaling exercises of the sort that Ecologists do for species prevalence. There is a very interesting story to be told about the many under-exploited overlaps between methods in Ecology and those in Sociology, particularly when it comes to methods for inductive multi-dimensional classification, and also models of the “mixed-effects” variety.   Continue reading…

New York City's Street Tree Species

29 February 2024 One more Tree Data figure. I had been messing around with the tree data clustering NTA neighborhoods by tree species and count profiles. But we can also cluster tree species by similarity of neighborhood profiles—that is, by trying to put the species most likely to be found together in neighborhoods close together in clusters. Here’s what that looks like, as a circular dendrogram. It is of course pleasing to make a dendrogram that clusters things that have real leaves and branches.   Continue reading…

Street Tree Diameters and Income in New York City Neighborhoods

29 February 2024 Here’s a figure showing the relationship between the median diameter of street-trees (i.e., trees not in parks) and median household income for New York City neighborhoods at the NTA level. The idea is that there should be a relationship between how leafy a neighborhood is and how well-off it is. But there’s more than one way to measure this. For example, you could count the density of trees in a neighborhood on the grounds the richer neighborhoods will be denser in street trees.   Continue reading…