Writing

For a complete list of academic publications, see my CV.

Plausible Reasoning and Spatial-Statistical Theory: A Critique of Recent Writings on ‘Spatial Confounding’.
Geographical Analysis (2024); https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12408

Statistical research on correlation with spatial data dates at least to Student’s (W. S. Gosset’s) 1914 paper on “the elimination of spurious correlation due to position in time and space.” Since 1968, much of this work has been organized around the concept of spatial autocorrelation (SA). A growing statistical literature is now organized around the concept of “spatial confounding” (SC) but is estranged from, and often at odds with, the SA literature and its history. The SC literature is producing new, sometimes flawed, statistical techniques such as Restricted Spatial Regression (RSR). This article brings the SC literature into conversation with the SA literature and provides a theoretically grounded review of the history of research on correlation with spatial data, explaining some of its implications for the the SC literature. The article builds upon principles of plausible inference to synthesize a guiding theoretical thread that runs throughout the SA literature. This leads to a concise theoretical critique of RSR and a clarification of the logic behind standard spatial-statistical models.

Modeling time trends for disease surveillance studies
JMIR Public Health & Surveillance (2022); Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)
Modeling time trends in disease incidence and mortality rates is a crucial and routine task for public health research. This paper introduces my ‘surveil’ R package for public health research, explains some of the advantages it has over the commonly-used join-point software, and applies it to a short study of colorectal cancer incidence and inequalities in urban Texas.

The Making of Florida’s ‘Criminal Class’: Race, Modernity, and the Convict Leasing Program, 1877-1919
Florida Historical Quarterly (2019)
Under the State of Florida’s convict leasing program (1877-1919) approximately 14,000 Floridians and visitors served sentences of hard labor at the pain of the lash. This article, which began as a master’s thesis at UBC, draws on over four decades of reports on the prison system by its administrators in the Florida Department of Agriculture, geographic sentencing data, data on prisoner characteristics, minutes from the Board of Pardons, and additional materials held in the Convict Lease Subject Files in the Florida State Archives. The study engages with a number of questions revolving around the inter-connected themes of forced labor, industrial interests, violence, disability, and racial ideology.