This report analyzes the TidyTuesday 2018-12-18 release on Cetaceans — 2,194 rows after cleaning and merge. How do cetacean sizes cluster by family — and who are the giants?
Five charts track record counts across time, category, and named entities — trend, leaders, distribution, tiers, and relationships. Where companion files exist in the repo, they are joined before analysis so reception, geography, or metadata columns are not left on the table.
FAST FACTS
DATASET CONTEXT
The source is the TidyTuesday release from 2018-12-18 (R for Data Science community). This working file contains 2,194 rows and 22 columns after merging all available CSV/XLSX tables in the week folder.
Charts are exported as Plotly JSON with PNG fallbacks. Medians are used for robustness where distributions skew. Index-style fields (row numbers, sequential IDs) are excluded from metric selection.
How to read this report: start with the chart caption, then ask what the metric actually means, what a non-expert should notice first, and what an expert would challenge in the source. The goal is not to memorize every number; it is to leave with a sharper question than the one you arrived with.
Reader path: if you are new to the topic, treat each chart as a guided tour of one question: who leads, how concentrated the field is, what changes over time, and where the outliers sit. If you already know the domain, use the same charts as a challenge: check whether the metric is the right proxy, whether the source omits an important population, and whether the headline survives the limitations section.
CHART 1 — LANDSCAPE
US dominates with 2,172 records.
The main bucket carries the story; this field does not have a meaningful long-tail split.
CHART 2 — VOLUME
Activity peaks in 1972.0 with 170 records.
Period-level counts reveal when the dataset's subject matter intensified.
CHART 3 — LEADERS
Bottlenose appears 1,668 times — the most recurring name in the file.
The top dozen account for a visible share of all 2,194 rows.
CHART 4 — CATEGORY
US is the largest bucket with 2,172 records.
Category concentration shows where editorial attention should focus first.
CHART 5 — TIMELINE
The leading names do not move in lockstep — some fade as others surge.
Tracking counts over time separates sustained presence from one-off spikes.
LIMITATIONS
Community-cleaned TidyTuesday snapshots are not live APIs. Missing values, spelling variants, and week-of-export coverage limits apply. Merged tables may fan out or duplicate rows when join keys are imperfect.
Findings describe the file on hand — treat them as structural signals about Cetaceans, not exhaustive truth about the full domain.
CONCLUSION
Read as a teaching map, Cetaceans shows why one metric is rarely enough: leaders, tails, trends, and relationships each answer a different question about the field.
The best reading is modest: use the chart to sharpen the question, then check the source and limits before turning it into a claim.
REFERENCES
Data Science Learning Community. (2018). TidyTuesday: Cetaceans. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2018/2018-12-18/allCetaceanData.csv
EDITOR'S NOTE
Artometrics data report from the TidyTuesday research pipeline. Charts and aggregates are reproducible from the embedded exhibits and public source files.