For those who don’t know it, MyBinder is a reproducible research automation tool that will take the contents of a Github repository, build a Docker container based on requirements files found inside the repo, and then present the user with a temporary, running container that can serve a Jupyter ...

Trying to find an examiner for a particular PhD thesis relating to a rather interesting datastructure for wrangling messy datatables, I wondered whether we might find a likely suspect amongst the R package maintainer community. We can get a list of R package maintainers here and a list of package ...

For ref, when running IRkernel Jupyter R notebooks, media objects can be embedded by making use of the shiny::tags function, that can return HTML elements with appropriate MIME types, and are renderable using _repr_html machinery (h/t @flying-sheep): For example: PS By the by, I notice the existence ...

I notice from the binder-examples/r repo that Binderhub now appears to offer all sorts of R goodness out of the can, if you specify a particular R build. From the same repo root, you can get: Jupyter notebook+R: http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=...

It’s coming round to that time of year where we have to create the assessment material for courses with an October start date. In many cases, we reuse question forms from previous presentations but change the specific details. If a question is suitably defined, then large parts of this ...

A quick note for displaying R htmlwidgets in Jupyter notebooks without requiring pandoc – there may be a more native way but this acts as a workaround in the meantime if not: PS and from the other side, using reticulate for Python powered Shiny apps.

In a couple of recent posts (Textualisation With Tracery and Database Reporting 2.0 and More Tinkering With PyTracery) I’ve started exploring various ways of using the pytracery port of the tracery story generation tool to generate variety of texts from Python pandas data frames. For my F1DataJunkie tinkerings I’...

I’m back on the R thang with F1 data from ergast.com, and started having a look at how drivers and teams compare at a circuit. One metric I came across for comparing teams over a season is the supertime, typically calculated for each manufacturer as the average of ...

Got some data, relating to how students move from one module to another. Rows are student ID, module code, presentation date. The flow is not well-behaved. Students may take multiple modules in one presentation, and modules may be taken in any order (which means there are loops…). My first take ...

From Stephen Wolfram, a nice phrase to describe the sorts of thing you can create using tools like Jupyter notebooks, Rmd and Mathematica notebooks: computational essays that complements the “computational narrative” phrase that is also used to describe such documents. Wolfram’s recent blog post What Is a Computational Essay?, ...

What’s an effective way of helping a student run a desktop application when their own computer won’t run the application, for whatever reason, locally? Virtualised software, running remotely, provides one solution. So here’s an example of a project that looks at doing just that:  DIT4C (“Data ...

In HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 1 I described a basic HTMLwidget for rendering hexJSON maps using d3-hexJSON, and HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 2 described updates for supporting colour. Having booked off today for emergency family cover that turned out not to be required, I had another stab at the ...

In my previous post – HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 1 – I described a first attempt at an HTMLwidget for displaying hexJSON maps using d3-hexJSON. I had another play today and added a few extra features, including the ability to: add a grid (as demonstrated in the original d3-hexJSON examples), ...

In advance of the recent UK general election, ODI Leeds published an interactive hexmap of constituencies to provide a navigation surface over various datasets relating to Westminster constituencies: As well as the interactive front end, ODI Leeds published a simple JSON format for sharing the hex data – hexjson that allows ...

I had a bit of a play last night trying to hook a Jupyter notebook container up to an Apache Drill container using docker-compose. The idea was to have a shared data volume between the two of them, but I couldn’t for the life of me get that to ...