This note lists a few of the mistakes that one can make before submitting a package to CRAN. The list is based on my own mistakes when submitting the ggnetwork package to CRAN for the first time (see this other note for comments about the package itself). Single quotes around ... [Read more...]

Over at his blog “One Tip per Day”, Xianjun Dong has produced an excellent list of “15 Practical Tips For a Bioinformatician”. This note is my own version of these tips, aimed at social scientists who need to write sustainable (i.e. reproducible) code for either individual or collective research projects. ... [Read more...]

This note explains how to use an application launcher along with text expansion and shell commands to accomplish a few specific tasks that can be useful to R users. Software requirements This note assumes that you are equipped with an application launcher that supports text expansion and can process shell ... [Read more...]

This note discusses the results of this project, which collects legislative data from several European parliaments (plus Israel). The project is coded in R, which has had consequences on its development. The project In a nutshell, the parlnet project scrapes private bills from 20 national parliaments, and then converts the sponsorship ... [Read more...]

This note documents the a small but growing microverse of R packages on CRAN to produce various forms of exponential random graph models (ERGMs), which are a kind of modelling strategy akin to logistic regression for dyadic data. The starting point: ergm The gravitational centre of the ERGM microverse is ... [Read more...]

This note shows a quick way to draw convex hulls, using dplyr and ggplot2. Our example data is a dataset of European parliamentary constituencies, some of which have been successfully geocoded with the help of the ggmap package. The package taps into ... [Read more...]

This note shows how to use the httr package to scrape the results of a search form. Example In this blog post, Baptiste Coulmont looks at some French nomination decrees published in the Journal officiel de la République française (JORF). Every nomination published by the French civil service ... [Read more...]

This note shows how to use the stringr package to clean a list of full names that need to be turned into unique identifiers, i.e. something that can be assigned as row names to a data frame. Example Let’s start by getting a list of real names by ... [Read more...]

The RStudio IDE is a central component of the R software ecology that makes it easier to code in R, or to use R with other tools. This note discusses its use in a teaching environment. Most of my teaching experience lies with Stata, but in recent years, I have ... [Read more...]

This note shows the most recent R-related bookmarks from my Pinboard feed. Most of them come from GitHub or R-Bloggers. The links open in new tabs/windows. The bookmarks are converted from RSS to HTML by Engin Kizil’s FeedEk plugin, whic... [Read more...]

Karl Broman has written a nice blog post to recommend writing unit tests for R packages. Here are a few more pointers on how to write these tests. I was introduced to unit tests by Barret Schloerke, who asked me to write some for the network plotting functions that I ... [Read more...]