Calle Börstell

@cborstell

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

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Calle Börstell@cborstell· 27d

Internal Structure of the voiceless rhyme

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".

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 27

There are six word sequences in Pope Leo's encyclical that could be read to the TMNT tune. Here are four of them. 🐢⚔️💢💥 Code: github.com/borstell/tid... #DataViz #ggplot2 #TidyTuesday

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 21

Finding out how round my cat is using #RStats Spoiler: Extremely round github.com/borstell/rou... #DataBS 🐈‍⬛🐱⚫️🔘

A photo of a tuxedo cat rolled up in a cat bed taken from above

A photo of a tuxedo cat rolled up in a cat bed taken from above with a yellow line marking the outline of the cat and a dot in the middle and an overlay of a perfect circle

A photo of a tuxedo cat rolled up in a cat bed taken from above with an overlay of a perfect circle

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 15

What's in a name? Sometimes an indicator of where you're from! UK Baby Names for #TidyTuesday #DataViz #ggplot2

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.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 14

True

Tuxedo cat snuggled up into a croissant on a soft little kitty bed

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 9

#linguistics

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.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 4

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"

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 4

Next week's #TidyTuesday on films based on video games 📽🎬🎮🕹📺 Maybe we've passed the peak of the 2010s? #DataViz #ggplot2

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.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jun 3

Pride flags with #ggplot2 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ github.com/borstell/pride

A panel with three pride flags: top left the standard pride rainbow flag; top right: the progressive rainbow flag; bottom: the trans flag.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· May 10

Twinned (or, sister) cities in this week's #TidyTuesday I did not know that most of them are fairly close to each other. However, some are so far away from each other that I'm assuming they were intentional antipodal links 🌎🌍🌏🏘🤝🏘 Code: github.com/borstell/tid... #R4DS #ggplot2 #RStats #DataViz

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."

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Apr 13

The campus bookstore is changing owners, hence putting their entire stock on sale. I got this haul of #linguistics book for 18€ (original price was 500€).

A table top showing 10 linguistics books facing up

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Apr 7

📦 My first #RStats package on CRAN: {readelan} A package dedicated to reading all files associated with ELAN: eaf, etf, ecv. Reads annotations, metadata, controlled vocabularies. Relevant for many in #linguistics perhaps? More info here: borstell.github.io/misc/readelan/

A hex sticker with lavender borders and the word(s) "readelan" in red, next to light red annotation cells

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Apr 7

🥳 #RStats

Screenshot of email reading "Thanks, on its way to CRAN."

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Apr 5

I love how little code is needed to make this from a video, using MediaPipe pose estimation into #ggplot2 #ggforce and #gganimate

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Mar 23

1 million decimals of pi #TidyTuesday Polar coordinates of each digit as ordered tiles, digit value corresponding to color 🟡🌞 #R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2 Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

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.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Mar 21

Welcome to Bergen 🇳🇴

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"

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Mar 20

One of my favorite #linguistics conferences, the LREC sign language workshop, has just released their list of accepted papers to the 2026 edition: www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec2026/pro... Image below shows the most frequent words in the paper titles.

A word cloud of terms from paper titles for the LREC sign language workshop. The most prominent words are "sign", "language", "corpus" and "data".

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Mar 15

Random walk #Rtistry with #ggplot2

A four-panel plot each showing a black line moving in a more and more squiggly manner as the line expands

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Mar 11

Going very minimal for this week's #TidyTuesday looking at judged likelihood of likelihood-expressing phrases in English. Code: github.com/borstell/tid... #R4DS #ggplot2 #DataViz

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.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Mar 4

Teaching about distributions on your birthday and asking your students to (anonymously) guess your age as an in-class activity. Apparently I'm approximately this old:

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".

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Feb 16

Sheep to people ratio in Aotearoa/NZ for #TidyTuesday 🐑:👤 🇳🇿🌿 #R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2 Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

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"

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Feb 15

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

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Feb 9

2026 Winter Olympics for #TidyTuesday Which disciplines have the most medal events, and are they on ice or snow? 🧊❄️🏒⛷️🏂⛸️🛷 Weirdly tall plot for curling feel 🥌🎯 #R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2 Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

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).

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Feb 2

Four years(!) after the chapter was originally written, the official publication is now live (pre-print has been out for some time though): doi.org/10.1093/oxfo... How can plurality be expressed with iconic forms across different modalities of human languaging? #linguistics

Screenshot of a chapter by Carl Börstell called "Iconic plurality across modalities"

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Feb 1

Very late to one of the last #TidyTuesday of 2025: The Languages of the World (Glottolog) Looking at linguistic diversity 🌍🌎🌏 Used this dataset to try out a personal theme package. Code: github.com/borstell/tid... #ggplot2 #DataViz #R4DS

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}

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Jan 6

About 6 months ago, I got so tired of getting mostly AI(-adjacent) papers in my Google Scholar Alerts for "sign language", so I added a new filter excluding a few keywords to get more relevant #linguistics papers. Now I checked the difference between the two alerts, and there's an obvious pattern.

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)

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Dec 10

One of the clearest patterns is an increase in borrowed signs for countries, which relates to both increased global contact and awareness of appropriateness of sign motivations 👋🏼🌍

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)

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Dec 8

The {qatarcars} dataset for #TidyTuesday How do the sizes of different car types relate to the dimensions of a standard parking space? 🅿️🚗🅿️🚙🅿️🛻🅿️🚙 Code: github.com/borstell/tid... #ggplot2 #RStats #DataViz

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.

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Dec 8

This might be for an extremely limited target group, but if you ever need to visualize landmarks/keypoints of Mediapipe or OpenFace computer vision models, I've created simple coordinate data files for plotting in a Github repo: github.com/borstell/com...

An outline of a face shape with numbered landmarks in key locations

An outline of a hand shape with numbered landmarks in key locations

An outline of a human stickfigure style with numbered landmarks in key locations

Calle Börstell@cborstell· Dec 3

I've always liked making bubbles in generative art 🫧🎨 #rtistry #ggplot2