TidyTuesday with Claude

A series of exploratory data analysis sessions on TidyTuesday datasets, produced by Jon Minton and Claude — in distinct working modes, and by different models. Sixteen pages across three sessions, two of them unsteered.

The site keeps the sessions clearly separated, because the way a page was made is part of what it is. Every page opens with a badge naming its session, mode and model:

Two of the sessions end with the model writing about its own working. Fable 5’s reflection compares co-developed against autonomous from the inside; Opus 5’s follows it a session later, and leads with the reasons the two arms are not cleanly comparable.

Session 3 · autonomously developed · Claude Opus 5

Six datasets chosen by a different model, under the same autonomous brief. Every number in the prose is computed inline from the data, and each page opens with the code needed to reproduce it from source.

  • The encyclical about machines that never mentions a machine (computational text analysis) (TidyTuesday 2026-06-23) — Rerum Novarum (1891) and Magnifica Humanitas (2026), 135 years apart on two machine ages. The 1891 text names a machine zero times in 13,925 words. Why tf-idf is the wrong tool for two documents, and what to use instead.
  • A year and a half behind: baby names as a fashion system (cultural evolution) (TidyTuesday 2026-06-16) — 52 years of Scottish naming. The top-ten share falls from 34% to 13%; Scottish fashions trail England and Wales by about eighteen months; and measuring diversity honestly means using Hill numbers when the rare tail is censored.
  • What makes a thing unfixable? (binary-outcome modelling) (TidyTuesday 2026-04-07) — 178,749 Repair Café attempts. Adding a motor costs a product 19 to 36 points of repairability across three matched product families; 45% of failures were parts, access or documentation; and why the age effect is not planned obsolescence.
  • The year the war overwrote the weather (historical event history) (TidyTuesday 2026-06-30) — 18,000 Irish shipwrecks on two clocks. Ships sink in winter, except in 1914–18, when they sank in spring. The map is drawn by the wrecks alone, and the U-boats off Donegal were scuttled on purpose.
  • Who pays? Three ways to fund a health system (inequality measurement) (TidyTuesday 2026-04-21) — WHO financing shares for 195 countries. The same question, averaged two ways, gives opposite headlines — and the gap between them is the finding.
  • Ninety-three penguins, and the discipline of not overclaiming (morphometrics at small n) (TidyTuesday 2026-07-14) — all 18 penguin species, 4–10 birds each. A slope significant at p = 0.0001 whose interval spans two incompatible biologies, and one emperor penguin that is probably an error, kept in and shown.
  • Notes from the third session (reflection) — what the make–look–revise loop actually caught, why Session 3 was less autonomous than Session 2, and where the extra length is a fault rather than a feature.

Session 2 · autonomously developed · Claude Fable 5

The model’s own picks, analyses and designs — one page in each of four registers.

  • How likely is ‘likely’? (statistical inference) (TidyTuesday 2026-03-10) — 5,174 people put numbers on 19 probability phrases. A Bradley–Terry model recovers a shared latent scale from pairwise choices alone, the public is tested against the UK intelligence “yardstick,” and a within-person coherence curve turns words into a psychophysics experiment.
  • Thirteen males per female: an island running out of mothers (substantive demography) (TidyTuesday 2026-03-03) — sixteen years of capture data on the Hermann’s tortoises of Golem Grad, where sexual harassment, emaciation and tiny clutches compound into a projected extinction. The mechanism of a “demographic suicide,” measurement by measurement.
  • A million digits of π, and not a pattern in sight (novel visuals + randomness theory) (TidyTuesday 2026-03-24) — a turtle walk through 100,000 digits, a convergence funnel, a digit-pair heatmap and the Feynman point: every test for pattern comes back empty, on a number that is the opposite of random.
  • How a cold sea breathes (physical time series) (TidyTuesday 2026-03-31) — eight years of a Nova Scotia water column as a depth–time heatmap: the annual heat pulse damping and lagging as it sinks, and the winter weeks when the sea turns upside-down.

Session 1 · co-developed · Claude Fable 5

Built live, in conversation — the original sessions.