Data processing and figure script for "The Evolution of Inequality", by Siobhán M. Mattison, Eric A. Smith, Mary K. Shenk, Ethan E. Cochrane, in Evolutionary Anthropology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21491. For this manuscript, I prepared and analyzed the data, and drew the two figures.
In particular, Figure 2's art style and organization was directly inspired from William H. McNeill's famous 1963 tome The Rise of the West. The ice core data used in Figure 1 and Figure 2 was extracted directly from Petit JR, Jouzel J, Raynaud D, et al. (1999) "Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica." Nature 399:429–43, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/20859, Figure 3.
In R, set the working directory to that containing this readme file. For example, on a Mac or Linux machine, you might type into the command prompt
setwd('~/Desktop/evolution-of-inequality')
if the folder containing the project is named 'evolution-of-inequality' and on your Desktop. You can tell if you are in the right place by typing in dir()
and seeing this readme.txt file as well as:
-
pathdata.txt
- raw path data exported from Figure 3 of Petit, et al. (1999) -
climate temps.svg
- the journal page in which Figure 3 appears, converted from PDF to SVG; I manually extractedpathdata.txt
from this file -
make_figures.r
- a short R script for extracting and preparing the key temperature figure that appears in Figure 1 and Figure 2 of Mattison, et al.
The analysis itself is relatively straightforward, and can be re-run by typing:
source('./make_figures.r')
with the project folder as the working directory. If all goes well, a new file named 'petit-1999-climate-stability.png' will be created that contains the ice core temperature data as a logarithmic time series.
The project is maintained by Bret Beheim (beheim@gmail.com) and is hosted at https://github.com/babeheim.