iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Catching up on a few #30DayChartChallenge pieces! All watercolor & ink. 🧜‍♀️ Day 15 - Correlation: Considering the hair tie vortex, and my desperation to hold onto them as the count gets low. 🧵1/4

A watercolor chart and illustrations showing how desperately I hold onto hair ties as they disappear one by one into the hair tie vortex. A bar chart shows the lifespan of hair ties increasing quickly as I get down to the last few. An illustration shows me in a Gollum-like stance, with text "My precioussss..." and "The last hair tie" as annotations. On the left, a sneaky cat paw pulls away a hair tie.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Day 9 #30DayChartChallenge: Wealth Missing from this post is my one person performance art where I just shout "That's a billion. That's a billion. BILLION. A BILLION DOLLARS. Another billion." etc randomly while painting these 780 little swatches.

Abstract watercolor artwork consisting of 780 color swatches that together look like a large knit blanket. Text reads: "The afghan below is made of 780 color swatches, each representing 1 BILLION DOLLARS of Elon Musk's net worth." A 1/2 swatch in gray below has an annotation reading "1/2 swatch is his estimated lifetime giving (0.5B). Source: Forbes reporting. Data from January 2026."

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Day 8 #30DayChartChallenge: circular. Serious research happening over here...nyacht. Drawing as I learn, boy did I make some bad assumptions. Watercolor and ink. 🦈🦜🍔

A venn diagram showing the overlaps (or lack of) between yacht rock, songs about boats, and Jimmy Buffett. Yacht rock barely overlaps with Songs about boats or sailing. Jimmy Buffett overlaps slightly more with Songs about boats or sailing. There is no overlap between Jimmy Buffett and Yacht Rock.

Descriptions for each circle read:
- Yacht Rock: only depends on sound. A breezy, polished blend of soul, jazz, R&B, and disco inspiration.

- Songs about boats or sailing: Has nothing to do with qualifying as yacht rock.

- Jimmy Buffett: Trop rock pioneer of island inspired jams blending folk, calypso, and country.

Other annotations are a small arrow pointing to the overlap of yacht rock and songs about boats or sailing labeled"Christopher Cross 'Sailing'", and a note between Yacht Rock and Jimmy Buffett labeled "eeeeh? Maybe? Probably gonna start a fight."

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Day 7 #30DayChartChallenge. Multi...scales? Questionable whether this fits the theme, but anyways here are 3 cool perceptual scales. Learned about the Bortle Dark Sky scale last month. Spent 10 years in EnvSci & found the Forel-Ule scale yesterday. Imagine what color scale I'll learn tomorrow.

A watercolor and ink sketch showing three color scales: the urine color scale (to measure dehydration), the Bortle Dark Sky scale (or sky darkness / pollution), and the Forel Ule Scale for water color.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Day 6 #30DayChartChallenge: Reporters Without Borders (Data Day) Watercolor and ink on cold press paper.

A vertical U.S. flag that is faded near the top, artistically representing an ongoing loss of press freedom. Two years are highlighted: 2020, and 2025, with global press freedom scores of 76.15 and 65.49, respectively.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Day 5 #30DayChartChallenge: Experimental I played around with different ways to represent my family. It's not quite right, but I like this direction because it reminds me of saguaros at sunrise. 🌵 Earlier sketches in thread ✏️🎨

A brightly colored abstract watercolor representing different branches of a family.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Day 4 #30DayChartChallenge: Slope A slope chart about our newest family member, Nazgûl (aka The Ghoul, The Witch King, Ghoulish, Little Wraith, etc.). Watercolor & ink.

A watercolor and ink hand drawn slope chart showing the state (Going Strong, or Struggling) of several family metrics before and after a cat, Nazgûl, moved in. Since his arrival, family nicknames and hilarity have increased; forearms, sleep, furniture, the dog's attitude, and uninvited mouseguests are struggling.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Day 3 #30DayChartChallenge: Mosaic. This is a fish tale, based on how Greg and I remember time spent fly fishing on 4 rivers we love. In the making of it we looked through old photos, revisited great memories, and more than once said “We’ve gotta get back there.” Watercolor on cold press paper.

A hand-painted watercolor mosaic chart representing personal experiences fly fishing on four rivers. Each segment is filled with a different fish pattern (brown trout, rainbow rout, mountain whitefish).

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Day 2 of the #30DayChartChallenge: Pictogram! A quick count of animals in the yard over a short span yesterday morning. I love marmots and this does not do them justice. Watercolor & ink.

A watercolor and ink drawing of a pictogram (chart), showing different counts of animals observed, using a cartoon representation of each species to represent each individual. Includes dark-eyed juncos (many), Steller's jays (4), mule deer (2), Teddy dog (1), Nazgul the cat (1), and a yellow-bellied marmot (1). Below each is a sketch of their tracks. Text within the chart area reads "Day 2: pictogram! This morning's yard critters (aka crittergram)."

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Day 1: Part-to-Whole Visualizing Teddy's magical expansion from a very average 45 pound dog into an immovable dire wolf once he hits the bed. Watercolor & ink. #30DayChartChallenge

A watercolor and ink illustration showing the breakdown of king size bed space when shared by a couple (combined for 50%), their cat (6%), a dog (40%), and a mandatory heat buffer between them (4%). Text label pointing to the dog reads "40% Teddy, the magically expanding dog."

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Reposted by Allison Horst

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 29/07/2025

Notebooks 2.0 is here! 📓🔮 Previewing today: Notebook Kit, an open file format for notebooks with open-source tooling for generating static sites; and Observable Desktop, a macOS desktop application for editing notebooks as local files, with a radical new approach to AI. observablehq.com/notebooks/2/

observablehq.com

Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview | Observable

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Happy first day of December! Hope you're skating through your R CMD checks 🤍❄️⛸️

A cute round monster, smiling while skating on a frozen pond in a winter snowscape with frosty pine trees. The skate tracks reveal what developers hope for in package checks: "0 warnings, 0 errors, 0 notes."

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

OR IS IT observable_insight_prep <- c("Allison", "Tanya")?

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Reposted by Allison Horst

Lara @laracrc.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

To celebrate this gem of a book by @statsteph.bsky.social, @ivelasq3.bsky.social and Rebecca Powell on complex survey data with #RStats and the #tidyverse, we are giving away one copy to a lucky winner. To enter, re-post this and follow me by Nov 24. Not affiliated with bsky.

Book cover of the book 'Exploring complex survey data analysis using R', showing a light blue background with a hand-drawn map showing mountains, houses, roads and the sea.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I recently had the opportunity to interview Ben Welsh (Reuters news applications editor), during a very interesting time for data journalists. Check out the story below! 👇

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Reposted by Allison Horst

Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com · 06/11/2024

I'm a climate scientist living in Texas who served as a lead author on the National Climate Assessment under the previous Trump administration. I witnessed first-hand its chilling impact on access to data, funding & publication of research, implementation of solutions, and scientists themselves. 🧵

axios.com

Trump victory has sweeping climate change consequences

From the endorsement of climate denial to a brain drain of climate scientists, Trump's victory will bring major changes.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

👻 Here's the ✨ new 2024 art, feat. community responses to the question "What's something in R that feels tempting, but is actually dangerous?" I couldn't fit them all, so I've added a blank version 👇🧵 so you can make your own (could be a fun class activity 😉) Happy Halloween, #rstats world! 🤡🎈

An illustration recreating the It movie poster, where a monster version of Pennywise peers out of a storm drain holding red balloons and hex stickers, enticing a little monster in a yellow raincoat who looks on. On the balloons are written different things to be cautious about in R / stats. On the raincoat are different hex stickers (for janitor, naniar, usethis, dplyr, renv...).

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

Little R horror monsters (2022). New R community inspired Halloween 2024 illustration coming up tomorrow 🎃🎈

Small fuzzy R monsters in costume as famous villains from horror movies. Left to right: Chucky (wearing a wig, rainbow shirt and overalls, with stitches on its face), the girl from The Ring (black long hair over face), Hannibal Lecter (masked with bars in front of mouth), and Jason (iconic hockey mask). On the wall behind them are different menacing tools (butcher knives, saws, scythe) with scary things on them, e.g. "Can't automatically merge," "screenshot error message," "no such file or directory", "$ operator is invalid for atomic vectors."

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

The responses are so good, & I learned quite a few new things! Thanks everybody, keep 'em coming -- the thread feels like the start of a fun blog post. 👻🎀👾🎀👾👻 Here's one that wasn't specifically made for Halloween but feels like the right vibes, from early 2021.

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Reposted by Allison Horst

Jenny Bryan @jennybryan.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

If you're an #rstats user, one way to protect yourself from yourself is to do: usethis::git_vaccinate() which will setup or modify your user-level (aka global) gitignore file to handle the most obvious R-associated files that probably don't belong in git. usethis.r-lib.org/reference/gi...

usethis.r-lib.org

Vaccinate your global gitignore file — git_vaccinate

Adds .Rproj.user, .Rhistory, .Rdata, .httr-oauth, .DS_Store, and .quarto to your global (a.k.a. user-level) .gitignore. This is good practice as it decreases the chance that you will accidentally leak...

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

I'm working on my 2024 Halloween R monsters illustration and #rstats folks, I need your help 👻🎃 What's something in data science, R, statistics, etc. that feels tempting but is very, very dangerous? In the meantime I'll be sharing some Halloween R art from previous years 🕷️🧟☠️ The first (2019?):

Two fuzzy monsters, one dressed as David Bowie and one as a witch, run screaming out of a haunted forest with spooky trees and red eyes watching them. On the tree branches are things like "setwd", fatal error, merge conflict, aborted R session, no metadata, etc.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

I absolutely loved working on this cover art w/ @statsteph.bsky.social, @ivelasq3.bsky.social, & Rebecca Powell! Fantasy maps + data? What a dream. Learn how to do tidy survey analysis in R 👇 🌟 Free online: tidy-survey-r.github.io/tidy-survey-... 📖 Preorder: www.routledge.com/Exploring-Co...

Cover of a book titled "Exploring Complex Survey Data Analysis Using R" by Stephanie Zimmer, Rebecca Powell, and Isabella Velásquez. Illustration is in the style of a fantasy map, but with data represented throughout the landscape. For example, mountain ridgelines are line charts, buildings create a bar chart, a farmer's fields make up a contingency table, light lightposts are lollipop charts, etc.

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Reposted by Allison Horst

ᴅʀ. ᴍᴏᴡɪɴᴄᴋᴇʟ'ꜱ @drmowinckels.io · 23/10/2024

Here is my opinion on important #rstats accounts to follow. go.bsky.app/8pYGwbP It is very much a curated list by me, and reflects my own opinion. I will be adding to it as I discover more folks i think should be on the list.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 28/10/2024

Got a special delivery of bRew together stickers (and sweet moose card!) from Angie Reed. Finding this in the mail, + reconnecting w/ so many great #rstats folks, has me feeling very optimistic 💙 If we haven't met, I'm Allison 👋 I do data science and art: allisonhorst.com Let's bRew this thing!

A photo of a greeting card with a large bull moose amongst pine trees. Scattered over the card are a handful of hex stickers featuring little monsters, dressed up as witches, brewing data reports together.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 24/03/2024

I've learned a lot about data loaders (in R, Python, SQL, or whatever language you 💗) to generate static data snapshots at build time for faster page loads & more strongly opinionated data apps/reports/dashboards. I wrote about the "what" & "why" of it: observablehq.com/blog/data-lo...

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Reposted by Allison Horst

hrbrmstr 🇺🇦 🇬🇱 🇨🇦 🏳️‍🌈 @hrbrmstr.dev · 20/03/2024

I cannot believe how quickly one can build prototypes in Observable Framework

web "app" with an input box, search results, a summary table, and a calendar view of the results

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Reposted by Allison Horst

Tanya Shapiro @tanyashapiro.bsky.social · 19/03/2024

Proud to be part of this project with Voltron Data! They just released their Benchmarking Report comparing GPU vs CPU performance. Theseus = crazy fast 🤯 Interactive data vizzes in report to prove it. So hyped to show off Observable Plot tricks in this one 🙌📊 voltrondata.com/benchmarks/t...

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 23/08/2023

Teaching intro data science or stats in environmental sciences / ecology this fall? The lterdatasampler package is now on CRAN, with curated real world datasets from the US Long Term Ecological Research program! Check it out: lter.github.io/lterdatasamp...

A hexagonal design with the words lterdatasampler at the top. Within the border are plants, animals and weather patterns representing the different datasets currently in the package.

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Allison Horst @allisonhorst.bsky.social · 26/07/2023

New platform new profile pic, hi everybody!

Allison and her dog Teddy sitting in the grass with a mountain in the background.

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