Crunching the Numbers: From R Scripts to Sports Stats and Stadium Heat ⚾📊

Hello Benchies!

This week’s stories prove that numbers don’t just inform, they reveal. Whether it’s understanding what makes Bluesky tick, seeing how payroll power shapes Major League Baseball, or uncovering how extreme heat is endangering young athletes, we’re spotlighting how journalists use data to make sense of the world. 

Grab your favorite fall drink and dig in—this one’s packed with insights.🍂

Here is our featured content this week:

📊🐦 How to Analyze bluesky Posts and Trends with R

This tutorial will help you to use R and open-source tools to pull posts, identify key phrases and analyze over 100,000 entries from Bluesky, showing how data journalists go beyond scrolling and start spotting trends.

It emphasizes that while great content helps, user connections and platform structure often play a bigger role in what gets traction, a lesson for anyone chasing insights on emerging social platforms.

💸⚾ Payroll Power: How Spending Tells the Story of Baseball Success

All MLB fans, assemble! This interesting story uses team payroll and performance data to explore how big-market clubs spend millions yet still fall short of championships, while leaner operations can thrive.

It signals a turning point in major-league baseball’s labor debate and shows that spending might open doors — but smart strategy defines winners.

Cool Stuff Corner: What are we reading?

📋🏆Test Your Sports Savvy

Think you know your sports facts? The Washington Post’s weekly interactive quiz challenges casual fans and trivia buffs with eight multiple-choice questions that get progressively tougher.

Can you take the heat? Tap your way through themes ranging from the World Series to Halloween costumes and check your results at the end—perfect to keep your game knowledge sharp and your mind moving.

🔥🏈AP journalists highlight how heat driven by climate change can kill high school football players

A report from Associated Press shows that high school football players face greatly increased risk of heat-related illnesses in recent summers — 58 players have died from exertional heatstroke since 1992, and rates continue to climb.

From the Vault🏛️

🧠💬 Using R and Media Cloud to Do Sentiment Analysis

This insightful tutorial by our very own programmer alumnus Benjamin ZH Tan using Media Cloud and R shows how to pull textual data, tokenize it and join it with sentiment lexicons (like NRC) to analyze tone across large corpora.

While the lexicon-based method is accessible, Tan warns that nuance can be lost, for example, industry-specific terms in the nuclear-power field may default to “neutral.”

That's all we've got for this week! Thanks for reading, and let us know if there's anything you'd like to see in these newsletters or in our coverage at [email protected].

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