Welcome to Policy in Numbers

  • My name is Dylan, the
  • author and creator of
  • this website and blog

Where Data, Politics & Technology Meet

  • This website is built around sharing learnings and visualizations of the best in politics, coding, and stats.

Newest Post: Robinhood-GME Brand Analysis

  • Let's analyze how likeable some brands are on Twitter...
  • ...Starting with sentiment around Robinhood during the Gamestop scandal!

Understand Canada's Electoral Environment

  • Explore the results of the last two Canadian elections in the Elections app in the Apps tab.

Other Interesting Bits & Bites

  • Check out the Interesting Links tab where I share my favourite stories, blogs, books, podcasts, travel recos and anything else!
  • Because life isn't all about politics, technology and careers

Data-Driven Political Perspectives

Armed with a BA in Political Science and an MA in Public Policy, I understand the complex world of policy and politics. Making sense of it through data and numbers is my passion.

Experienced Management Consultant

Have consulted for dozens of clients across industries. Currently focused on corporate strategy driven by Machine Learning and Big Data analytics.

Election Analytics & Strategy

What is the story of each election? How do parties succeed in election campaigns? What can data tell us about voter psychology? I love trying to answer these questions every day in my spare time!

Data Analyst

You don’t need to be a data scientist to use R or Python to tell stories. Check out my instructional coding blog posts where I make ‘FUN’ctional programming fun again (hahaha…)

Offering My Best Career Advice

Having been through ups and downs in my career, I have learnt a ton and am still learning. Love to share my experiences, advice and research in my blog and on LinkedIn.

Other Interests?

Plan to constantly share things I see, hear and read about in the world. Click to get my recos for great (external) podcast episodes, books and well-written opinion pieces!

What’s Happening on the blog

Check out the most recent blog posts in politics, technology, careers and more!

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Analyzing Brand Sentiment with Robinhood, Gamestop & R

By Dylan Anderson on 13 April, 2021

Brands are essential. They live in our minds as ideas and each person constantly interacts with hundreds of brands a day, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. But what is their role in data science? Well given most tech is fueled by strong business brands, it is probably essential for any data scientist to have even a basic an understanding of brands. In this post, I want to explain how to do a simple brand sentiment analysis using Twitter.

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Visualizing the Proportion of Women In Governments Around the World

By Dylan Anderson on 8 March, 2021

Happy International Women’s Day! In the spirit of the day, I wanted to do a post celebrating the many wonderful women of this world. In keeping with my political analytics topics, I thought it would be interesting to look at the proportion of women are in government by country, and how that has changed over the past few decades. Luckily The World bank has such a dataset, measuring the proportion of government seat’s held by women in every country throughout the world.

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Mesmerize Your Readers With Animated Graphs & GIFs in R

By Dylan Anderson on 25 February, 2021

In my last post, I demonstrated how you can create graphs and text that tell a nice story about how much the American public approved of each of the past 14 Presidents! So, how about we make the information more fun to watch? Luckily, R can accomplish this. With the gganimate and magick packages, GIF building is easy and effective. Let’s look at the end result first, so I can reel you into making this for yourself.

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Storytelling With Your Graphs In R Using ggplot2

By Dylan Anderson on 10 February, 2021

A few weeks ago, I tuned into an RStudio talk by John Burn-Murdoch about reporting and visualizing the COVID pandemic. As a data journalist at the Financial Times, he has been extremely influential over the past year creating well-known charts and graphics about the spread of COVID and it’s toll on the world. And it is all because his graphics tell a story. As a consultant, I know the importance of storytelling, but doing it in programming is difficult as the story often gets lost behind the data.

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Work & Educational History

From your first job to your last finals exam, a person is a character of their experiences. Nothing has shaped me more than the journey I have gone through both in my professional and educational careers. Proud to be associated with these great companies and universities.