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I really like developing software and making my own life and work easier with it. But what I enjoy even more is to see others actually use it! So every now and then I look at CRAN download counts of my R packages. I’m not in any top-10 rankings or anything. But that was also never the point. I just like sharing my knowledge and see others use it!

Everyone is talking about AI at the moment. So when I talked to my collogues Mariken and Kasper the other day about how to make teaching R more engaging and how to help students overcome their problems, it is no big surprise that the conversation eventually found it’s way to the large language model GPT-3.5 by OpenAI and the chat interface ChatGPT. It’s advantages for learning R (or any programming languages) are rather obvious:

After a hiatus of three years already(!) I wanted to make another Valentine’s post. Like in 2019 and 2020 I wanted to make something special for my wonderful R-Lady. I tried to figure rayshader out for a while now and tried to make a heart shape map first. After some failed attempts I noticed you can also turn ggplot2 objects into 3-D objects, which is absolutely amazing. So without further ado, here is some code:

I have tried to venture into Python several times over the years. The language itself seems simple enough to learn but as someone who has only ever used R (and a bit of Stata), there were two things that held me back: I never really found an IDE that I liked. I tried a few different ones including Spyder and Jupyter Notebook (not technically an IDE) and compared to RStudio and R Markdown they felt rather limited.

My thesis “Troublemakers in the Streets? A Framing Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Protest in the UK 1992-2017” is available on the website of the University of Glasgow since last week. It scrutinises how mainstream news media in the United Kingdom have framed domestic protest over the last three decades. I will (try to) publish parts of this research for different audiences over the next year. But here I wanted to summarise a few key points.

If you have build your homepage using blogdown, it’s actually quite simple to integrate Javascript snippets in it. While this is mentioned in the book “blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown”, it still took me a little bit to undertstand how it works. As an example, let’s make different versions of a simple plot and let the user decide which one to display. First I make the plots and save them in a sub-directory:

R 4.0.0 was released on 2020-04-24. Among the many news two stand out for me: First, R now uses stringsAsFactors = FALSE by default, which is especially welcome when reading in data (e.g., via read.csv) and when constructing data.frames. The second news that caught my eye was that all packages need to be reinstalled under the new version. This can be rather cumbersome if you have collected a large number of packages on your machine while using R 3.

Like last year I wanted to make something special for my wonderful R-Lady. This year the main work was done by the very talented Will Chase, who makes wonderful aRt including the animation this post is based on. All I did to change the original animation was to cut it into a heart shape and carve our initials into the center. Enjoy: library(dplyr) library(poissoned) library(gganimate) # generate points pts <- poisson_disc(ncols = 150, nrows = 400, cell_size = 2, xinit = 150, yinit = 750, keep_idx = TRUE) %>% arrange(idx) # generate heart shape hrt_dat <- data.

Today I was struggling with a relatively simple operation: unnest() from the tidyr package. What it’s supposed to do is pretty simple. When you have a data.frame where one or multiple columns are lists, you can unlist these columns while duplicating the information in other columns if the length of an element is larger than 1. library(tibble) df <- tibble( a = LETTERS[1:5], b = LETTERS[6:10], list_column = list(c(LETTERS[1:5]), "F", "G", "H", "I") ) df ## # A tibble: 5 x 3 ## a b list_column ## <chr> <chr> <list> ## 1 A F <chr [5]> ## 2 B G <chr [1]> ## 3 C H <chr [1]> ## 4 D I <chr [1]> ## 5 E J <chr [1]> library(tidyr) unnest(df, list_column) ## # A tibble: 9 x 3 ## a b list_column ## <chr> <chr> <chr> ## 1 A F A ## 2 A F B ## 3 A F C ## 4 A F D ## 5 A F E ## 6 B G F ## 7 C H G ## 8 D I H ## 9 E J I I came across this a lot while working on data from Twitter since individual tweets can contain multiple hashtags, mentions, URLs and so on, which is why they are stored in lists.

I’m happy to announce that rwhatsapp is now on CRAN. After being tested by users on GitHub for a year now, I decided it is time to make the package available to a wider audience. The goal of the package is to make working with ‘WhatsApp’ chat logs as easy as possible. ‘WhatsApp’ seems to become increasingly important not just as a messaging service but also as a social network—thanks to its group chat capabilities.