Replicating a New York Times Table of Swedish COVID-19 deaths with gt - Table Contest Submission

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Replicating a New York Times Table of Swedish COVID-19 deaths with gt

Authors: Malcolm Barrett
Affiliations: Livongo Health

Abstract: In this blog post, I describe how to replicate a table from the New York Times (NYT) in gt. The inspiration for this post comes from an NYT article on Sweden's herd immunity strategy for COVID-19 and the resulting excess mortality. In the NYT article, the authors present a table of excess deaths for Sweden and other countries in Europe. I thought this table was remarkably good: it’s simple, clear, and beautiful. The tutorial shows how you can make the same sort of table in gt.

Full Description:

Table Type: static-HTML
Submission Type: Tutorial
Table: https://malco.io/2020/05/16/replicating-an-nyt-table-of-swedish-covid-deaths-with-gt/
Repo: https://github.com/malcolmbarrett/malco.io/blob/master/content/post/2020-05-16-replicating-an-nyt-table-of-swedish-covid-deaths-with-gt/index.Rmd
RStudio Cloud:
DT package used:
gt package used: true
reactable package used:
flextable package used:
huxtable package used:
kableExtra package used:
Other packages:

2 Likes
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This is nicely done!

Random question: do you happen to know what data visualizations tools/technologies are used by NYT? I have read in various places that R is one of tools that they use. Their tables and charts all have a very unique NYT feel, so clearly they are not applying anything "off-the-shelf"...guessing lots of customizations.

From the article, their choropleth map at the beginning and the line-with-circles near the end are very effective bits of data viz as well.

3

Many visualizations you see from the NYT are developed with D3.js created by Mike Bostock. There is also an R wrapper for the library: https://rstudio.github.io/r2d3/.

D3.js is not easy to learn though.