All posts (Page 64 of 122)
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Introduction
Open Trade Statistics (OTS) was created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval.
The project started when I was affected by the fact that many Latin American Universities have limited or no access to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN COMTRADE).
There are alternatives to COMTRADE, for example the Base Pour L’Analyse du Commerce International (BACI) constitutes an improvement over COMTRADE as it is constructed using the raw data and a method that reconciles the declarations of the exporter and the importer. The main problem with BACI is that you need UN COMTRADE institutional access to download their datasets.
...rOpenSci is one of the first organizations in the R community I ever interacted with, when I participated in the 2016 rOpenSci unconf. I have since reviewed several rOpenSci packages and been so happy to be connected to this community, but I have never submitted or maintained a package myself. All that changed when I heard the call for a new maintainer for the qualtRics package. “IT’S GO TIME,” I thought. 😎
Qualtrics is an online survey and data collection software platform. Qualtrics is used across many domains in both academia and industry for online surveys and research, including by me at my day job as a data scientist at Stack Overflow. While users can manually download survey responses from Qualtrics through a browser, importing this data into R is then cumbersome. The qualtRics R package implements the retrieval of survey data using the Qualtrics API and aims to reduce the pre-processing steps needed in analyzing such surveys. This package has been a huge help to me in my real day-to-day work, and I have been so grateful for the excellent work of the package’s original authors, including the previous maintainer Jasper Ginn. This package is currently the only package on CRAN that offers functionality like this for Qualtrics’ API, and is included in the official Qualtrics API documentation.
...Last month we released a new version of pdftools and a new companion package qpdf for working with pdf files in R. This release introduces the ability to perform pdf transformations, such as splitting and combining pages from multiple files. Moreover, the pdf_data() function which was introduced in pdftools 2.0 is now available on all major systems.
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Split and Join PDF files
It is now possible to split, join, and compress pdf files with pdftools. For example the pdf_subset() function creates a new pdf file with a selection of the pages from the input file:
conditionz is a new (just on CRAN today) R package for controlling how many times conditions are thrown.
This package arises from an annoyance in another set of packages I maintain: The brranching package uses
the taxize package internally, calling it’s function taxize::tax_name(). The taxize::tax_name() function
throws useful messages to the user if their API key is not found, and gives them instructions
on how to find it. However, the user does not have to get an API key. If they don’t they then get subjected to
lots of repeats of the same message.
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Stefanie Butland, rOpenSci Community Manager
Some things are just irresistible to a community manager – PhD student Hugo Gruson’s recent tweets definitely fall into that category.
I was surprised and intrigued to see an example of our software peer review guidelines being used in a manuscript review, independent of our formal collaboration with the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE). This is exactly the kind of thing rOpenSci is working to enable by developing a good set of practices that broadly apply to research software.
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