Calle Börstell

@cborstell.bsky.social

1898 Followers 539 Following

Linguist at the University of Bergen 🇳🇴 #SignLanguages, #linguistics, #RStats & #dataviz

A poster of the film "Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind" showing Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey lying on the ice next to each other. The title has been changed to "Internal Structure of the voiceless rhyme".
A stacked plot with text only in the style of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) logo, each showing a word sequence from Pope Leo's encyclical that matches the stress pattern of TMNT, e.g., the bottom one reading "Therefore action is required". Data: Vatican via TidyTuesday & CMU Sphinx; Packages: {tidyverse, patchwork, shadowtext, slider, tidytext}; Visualization: C. Börstell
A photo of a tuxedo cat rolled up in a cat bed taken from above
A complex graphic with the title "Out of 100 children in the UK named ___ in 1997-2024, how many are found in ... England & Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland". Underneath, there are six panels each with a header resembling the "Hello my name is" name tag sticker, with a different name filled out for each (Simon, Gemma, Dara, Meabh, Stewart, Catriona), above a 10x10 grid of filled squares representing the three country regions. Simon & Gemma are mainly England & Wales; Dara & Meabh are mainly Northern Ireland; Stewart & Catriona are mainly Scotland.
Tuxedo cat snuggled up into a croissant on a soft little kitty bed
Colleagues talking meme: 1: What’s your favorite word? 2: Wug 1: But that’s a made up word. 2: They’re all made up.
The quote "Actually, Frankenstein is the doctor, the monster is Frankenstein's Monster" but crossed out and replaced with "Actually, ggplot is the function, the package is ggplot 2"
A bar chart in the style of an 8bit video game, with green pipes showing the bars of "Films Based on Video Games: Number of films based on video games by decade of release date". Data from Wikipedia via TidyTuessday. The graph shows a rapid increase from 4 and 32 films in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, to 87 and 168 in the 2000s and 2010s, respectively, down to the (current decade) 2020s at 59.
A panel with three pride flags: top left the standard pride rainbow flag; top right: the progressive rainbow flag; bottom: the trans flag.
A histogram of "Distances between Twinned Cities around the World", with a world map inset in the top right. The caption reads: "Based on 10,596 twinned cities (or, sister cities) listed on Wikipedia, the majority of them — 5,383 (50.8%) — are less than 2,000 km apart. A mere 80 (0.8%) of them are more than 18,000 km apart, most of them connecting South America with East Asia, or in a few cases connecting Europe with New Zealand. The greatest distance between two twinned cities is that of Asunción & Taipei — 19,929 km apart."
A table top showing 10 linguistics books facing up
A hex sticker with lavender borders and the word(s) "readelan" in red, next to light red annotation cells
Screenshot of email reading "Thanks, on its way to CRAN."
A stick figure GIF in black on a white background showing a cartwheel into a back tuck handspring and backflip
A circle formed by many small tiles (as pixels) in the gold to orange color spectrum, resembling a sun, with the Pi symbol vaguely visible at the center.
A split collage image showing a bridge in front of a lake and mountain background, the right image showing a zoomed-in version of a sign on the bridge reading "fartsløp"
A word cloud of terms from paper titles for the LREC sign language workshop. The most prominent words are "sign", "language", "corpus" and "data".
A four-panel plot each showing a black line moving in a more and more squiggly manner as the line expands
A black background with white/gray text with the title "Likelihood of likelihood phrases: As judged by 5000+ people in Kucharski (2026)". The proportional fill of each word corresponds to its median %-likelihood, from "Will Happen" and "Almost Certain" which are completely filled, to "Remote Chance", "Highly Unlikely" And "Almost No Chance" which are all almost completely unfilled. Data: Kucharski (2026); Packages: {tidyverse, marquee}; Visualization: C. Börstell.
A histogram spanning from 20 to 50 years old on the x axis, with a slightly left-skewed distribution with a mode at 37. Title reads "How old is Calle? Simulated distribution based on students' guesses".
A graph with the title "Sheep to people ratio in Aotearoa/NZ: Data from 1935–2024 by 5-year averages" on a light blue background with a pale green area resembling land. The x-axis shows years by 5-year increments and the y-axis shows the rounded number of sheep per people. Between 1935 and 1980, the ratio is about 20:1, but then rapidly dropping to about 5:1 in the 2020s. The top corner shows an outline of Aotearoa. Caption reads: "Packages: {tidyverse, marquee, patchwork, rnaturalearth, rvest}; Data: StatsNZ & Statista via TidyTuesday & Wikipedia; Visualization: C. Börstell"
A two-sided bar chart showing the average number of medals won per Olympic Games: top 10 countries by most winter medals won relative to summer medals. Austria and Norway are the only two countries for which the mean number of medals per games is higher for winter games than summer games
A scatter plot in the shape of a curling sheet (lane) showing the number of medal events at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Each discipline is shown as a curling stone, in either red (snow) or yellow (ice), with its discipline name labeled next to it, and numbered by the number of medal events within the discipline. Freestyle Skiing is at the top with 45 events, followed by Speed Skating (42) and Cross-Country Skiing (35).
Screenshot of a chapter by Carl Börstell called "Iconic plurality across modalities"
A scatterplot entitled "Linguistic diversity in the world: Language family entropy by binned latitude" showing that "The amount of linguistic diversity in the world — as measured by language family entropy — decreases as one moves further away from the equator." Data: Glottolog 5.2.1; Visualization: C. Börstell; Packages: {tidyverse, scales, marquee, cbthemes}
A line chart showing "Cumulative publications in Google Scholar Alerts" from July 2025 to January 2026, with one line showing all sign language alerts (at around 1200 by January 2026) and the other showing sign language alerts without AI keywords (around 400 by January 2026)
A point and whiskers plot showing an increase in the probability of using a borrowed sign for countries across age groups (i.e. increase over time)
A plot titled "Qatar Cars: 105 car models' length & width relative to a standard parking space of 2.5×5 meters". Each car model's length and width is plotted as overlapping dotted line boxes relative to drawn white lines representing the size of a parking spot. Four different model types each have one parking space: coupe, hatchback, sedan and SUV. SUVs are borderline not fitting inside the parking space. Data: Musgrave (2025) {qatarcars} via TidyTuesday | Packages: {tidyverse, ggtext} | Visualization: C. Börstell.
An outline of a face shape with numbered landmarks in key locations
A 4-panel square of generative art each showing a random sample of colored bubbles on different sizes on top of diagonal lines with frames around each panel. Each panel has its own 2-color palette.
Close up of a sheet pan full of S-shaped yellow buns with raisins in them
A blue background with yellow text and a yellow ribbon coming down the left side. There is an animation of 2,017 Swedish town names showing up in their geographical location, slowly forming the outline of Sweden.
A grayscale picture of a bearded man's face in two rows and three columns. Each panel from top left to bottom right gets progressively more smeared looking
A chart with the title "My dear Watson ..." and subtitle caption "In the four canonical Sherlock Holmes novels, the phrase “My dear Watson” occurs 15 times — 10 times in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"; not even once in "A Study in Scarlet". In the panel below, each square tile (■) represents a line of text — in chronological order — with the highlighted tiles showing the location of the famous phrase in each of the novels." Each highlighted tile representing an occurrence of the phrase is marked with a magnifying glass and a path line tracing the chronological order of phrases across books. Data: {sherlock} via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, ggview, marquee}; Visualization: C. Börstell
A line chart in the style of Chartle (a statistics guessing game) on a dark gray background with light gray/white text and lines, showing "Estimated incidence of tuberculosis per 100 000 population". One line is highlighted in coral red, showing the change for Marshall Islands from 2012 to 2023, with a huge surge from around 400/100k to well over 1000/100k in 2018. Data: World Health Organization via {getTBinR} and Sam Abbott via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, scales}; Visualization: C. Börstell
Bar chart showing proportion of my R files that call {purrr} functions, showing an increase from 0% in 2020 to 30% in 2025
A plot with the title "Lead concentration in Flint water samples in 2015", consisting of a distribution plot (left) and a map of Michigan with Flint marked, with a water pipe coming out of Flint ending in a faucet emoji. The subtitle contains a longer text explaining "In 2015, the Michigan Department of Environment (MDEQ) collected 71 water samples in Flint to evaluate the concentration of poisonous lead in the drinking water. The Lead and Copper Rule posits that if more than 10% of samples are above 15 parts per billion (ppb), action is required by officials. The MDEQ originally excluded two samples with high readings, thus resulting in below-threshold readings overall. Suspicious of the results, a citizen science project coordinated by Prof. Marc Edwards and colleagues at Virginia Tech collected 271 new samples, which pointed to generally higher levels of lead concentration than the official MDEQ data had suggested. The plot below shows the distribution of samples in relation to the 10% threshold when each dataset is resampled 10,000 times using bootstrapping (the MDEQ data bootstrapped both with and without the samples originally excluded). When including the originally excluded samples, both datasets would indicate that the Flint drinking water is likely to contain dangerous levels of lead at a rate which would require official action for public safety. In 2014, changes made to the water supply source in Flint, Michigan resulted in a public health crisis with many residents being exposed to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water. Data: MDEQ & Virginia Tech in Loux & Gibson (2018) via TidyTuesday | Packages: {tidyverse, ggarrow, ggdist, marquee, patchwork, raturalearth, rsample, scales}| Visualization: C. Börstell"
A density plot with added eyes and mouth to resemble a ghost and a title saying Happy Halloween in a spooky font
A plot with the title "British Literary Prizes (1991-2022): Proportion of women & non-binary authors among literary prize recipients over time". The plot is designed to resemble a bookcase, with each 5-year time period from 1991 to 2022 featured as a single shelf, and books representing individual prize recipients. Women and non-binary winners are color coded pink-ish and light blue-ish, respectively. Women and non-binary authors were in the minority until 2010–2014 and have constituted about half of the winners since then. Data: Post45 Data Collective via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, marquee}; Visualization: C. Börstell.
A scatter plot with the title "Number of words in my peer reviews of original and revised article submissions", with points shown either as red squares (original) or gold circles (revised), spanning from late 2017 to late 2025, with about 4 to 8 data points per year and most points falling between 500 and 3000 words (revised manuscript reviews somewhat lower).
A photo of twin mountains in the distance under a large cloud on an otherwise blue sky, beyond green lands. The image is pixelated in a way that resembles an oil painting.
A line chart showing temperature changes (daily min and max readings) from 22 weather stations across the UK. The line charts include model fit lines showing average temperatures across stations over time (1970 to 2024), showing the estimated average increase at the right margin (about +1.5 degrees Celsius). On the right of the line chart, there is map of the UK showing the location of each weather station. Four of them are marked with annotations showing the highest (Cambridge, 2008) and lowest (Newton Rigg, 2010) monthly means and the hottest January (Yeovilton, 1990) and coldest July (Lerwick, 1993). Data: UK Met Office via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, geomtextpath, ggarrow, ggtext, glue, rnaturalearth, scales}; Visualization: C. Börstell.
Two gesture sequences in photos of a white man with a dark sweater (head is censored by a black circle). Both show a gesture form produced for the meaning 'combine', with the top image showing the two hands collecting items from multiple sources and moving to a single spot and the bottom image showing the gesturer presenting each hand and then moving them towards each other in front of the torso, finally contacting with intermeshed fingers.
A bar chart showing the distribution of one- vs. two-handed gestures for target (81% two-handed) and control (55% two-handed) items. Next to it, the equivalent bar charts for each participant shows that the pattern is consistent across all of them.
A plot showing the "Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population of European areas (Northern, Eastern, Western, Southern)" as line charts from 2014 to 2024. Annual percentages (lines) and confidence intervals (ribbons) — Dotted lines show European average. Data: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Packages: {tidyverse, ggtext, patchwork, rnaturalearth, scales}; Visualization: C. Börstell. Next to each line chart is a map of Europe with the relevant countries (of the area) filled in with a color coding.
A scatter plot on a white background with blue dots clearly along a linear correlation line between x and y axes
A plot that says Euroleague Basketball teams by stadium capacity on a offwhite background and black/gray text. Each data point is plotted as a basketball (emoji) and text label with the name of the team(s) playing at the arena, along a parabola simulating the trajectory of a basketball shot towards a schematic basketball hoop located in the bottom right corner. A caption reads: "There are 20 teams in Euroleague Basketball, playing at 19 unique arenas with a median capacity of 12,700 spectators. The biggest arena by capacity is Belgrade Arena which hosts the teams Crvena zvezda Meridianbet and Partizan and seats up to 18,386 people. The smallest arena is Salle Gaston Médecin which hosts Monaco and has a capacity of 5,000. Data: EuroLeague & Wikipedia via {TidyTuesday}; Packages: {tidyverse, ggrepel, ggtext, glue, scales} ; Visualization: C. Börstell."
Line chart showing a simulation of the Monty Hall problem. Two lines representing the strategies stay vs switch quickly converge around the ⅔ and ⅓ probabilities of winning the car, respectively
A map of Sweden in 10 different panels, each showing the log odds frequency of different 3-letter place name endings in various shades of red (darker means higher prevalence; gray means no data).
A graphic in the style of a yellowish page of sheet music. Title says "Taylor's Albums (melodized)". On the right, each album is represented by a line of sheet music. On the left, the text reads: "Each album as a single line of sheet music. The key of each track as a single note. Each note's duration as the relative track duration (z scored) across all albums."
A map of Sweden in 10 different panels, each showing the proportional frequency of different place name endings in various shades of blue
A data visualization in the style of handwritten/-drawn notes on a piece of paper. Title reads "Cranes at Lake Hornborgasjön: Observations of cranes at the Swedish lake peak earlier over time". The graph shows ridgelines along dates from mid-March to end of April (x-axis) across the years 1994 to 2024 (y-axis). The first date each year where that year's maximum number of observations was reached is marked with a little handdrawn X on the year ridgelines. Across all years, there are lines showing the mean and median values for first max observations across years down the middle. X'es are generally farther to the right in early years (i.e. later in the spring) and farther to the left in more recent years (earlier in the spring). In the plot margins, there are embedded images of cranes in flight. Data: "Transtatistik", Naturum Hornborgasjön via TidyTuesday; Image: Gllawm, Wikimedia Commons curid=147233798; Packages: {tidyverse, magick}; Visualization: C. Börstell
A line chart with the title "Cumulative increase of documented languages by "family"/grouping across releases of Glottolog: only showing families with 10 or more languages". It shows the cumulative increase over time with releases of the Glottolog language database. "Sign languages" is highlighted in a turquoise line, steadily increasing, having increased by around 26% from version 3.1 to version 5.2.
A map showing the distribution of the 227 sign languages documented in Glottolog 5.2 (only 224 languages shown as 3 are missing coordinates). The languages are shown as turquoise dots, distributed across all continents.
A GIF showing the sign for 'sign language' in Swedish Sign Language (and also International Sign) as typewriter-style art, with letters corresponding to the darkness of the grayscale colors in the video.
A plot titled "FIDE chess players by country & birth year: Ranking of the top International Chess Federation (FIDE) countries by the number of rated players (Elo rating ⩾1400) per age group (year of birth). Number of players shown under each flag (percentage of age group in brackets). Numbers under the flags show the number of players (with percentage of totals in brackets)". The plot resembles a chessboard, with a grayish purple background and the rankings being displayed as country flags on top of the chessboard's squares. In the oldest age brackets (left side), European countries are dominating with Germany, Spain and France having the most players. On the right side with the younger age groups, India is quickly rising to the top, in the youngest age group (2010—2021), Sri Lanka is also up-and-coming. Data: FIDE (September 2025) via TidyTuesday; Packages: {ggtext, tidyverse}; Visualization: C. Börstell
A bar plot that resembles the image quote posted, showing 7 filing cabinets on a sidewalk side by side, resembling a bar chart. The bar chart has lines separating the individual values, thus mimicking drawers of each cabinet.
A scatterplot on a cream white background with the title "The chicken 🐓 or the egg 🥚?". The square grid is split by four reddish arrows pointing outwards north/south/east/west. A textbox in the top left reads "Based on 2,218 recipes categorized by the cuisine (country, region, culture), this graph shows the proportional frequency of the ingredients chicken vs. egg (x-axis) & butter vs. oil (y-axis) mentioned across recipes of each cuisine". Each point and text in the plot indicates where on a scale from chicken (left) to egg (right) and butter (top) to oil (bottom) the cuisine is located. Turkish is found at the very center of the plot, Chinese and Thai in the bottom left (chicken & oil), whereas Austrian/German/Swiss and particularly Scandinavian are in the top right (egg & butter). An arrow points at the top right data point saying "Scandinavian cuisine is a clear outlier". Visualization: C. Börstell; Data: allrecipes.com via {tastyR} & TidyTuesday; Packages: {ggarrow, ggrepel, ggtext, tidyverse}
A graph titled "Henley Passport Index Data" explaining "Passports ranked by the median number of countries that can be visited visa-free: Stamps show the median number of visa-free countries that could be visited at each 5-year mark". Each region (Europe, Caribbean, Americas, Oceania, Middle East, Asia, Africa) is represented by a bump chart along the x-axis, with Europe ranking at the top from 2010 to 2025, followed by Caribbean, Americas, Oceania, Middle East, Asia and Africa. Caribbean overtook Americas in 2015; Africa, Asia and Middle East switching rankings a few times. Each 5-year mark shows the median number of visa-free countries that year for the region, stylized as a stamp in a box (differing in angles). The top right corner features a round red stamp with 2010-2025 and the text "Data: Henley & Partners via TidyTuesday; Packages: {tidyverse, ggbump, ggtext, patchwork}; Visualization: C. Börstell"