magick

As 2018 nears its end, it’s time for me to look back on my R/Twitter year with the same simple method as last year: let me identify and webshoot my 9 best tweets of 2018!

Hex stickers remind me of Pogs, except they’re cooler because you can combine them together! Some people do that very smartly.

Now when I forget how to do an #rstats analysis I can just check the back of my laptop #runconf16 pic.twitter.com/DY7UgeBzYV

— David Robinson (@drob) 1 d’abril de 2016

I’ve got a pretty random hex stickers combination on my laptop, but after all it could be worse…

My boyfriend decided he is post-hex / post-#tidyverse pic.twitter.com/ADtyORMxHL

— Hilary Parker (@hspter) 13 de setembre de 2017

Now since I’m a magick/collage fan, you can bet I’ve wondered how to use R in order to combine stickers automatically! Say I have a bunch of sticker PNGs, how could I produce a map to design my laptop style? Read to find out more…

Remember the nascent series of blog posts about Parks and recreation? Well, we’re still at one post, but don’t worry, here is a new one, and I’m sure the series will eventually be a real one. I’m looking at you, my R-Ladies friends. That said, today is not a day for passive agressive hints, because I’ve decided it’s Galentine’s day and I’ll show you how to craft cards for your R-Ladies friends from your R prompt!

I’ve now done a few collages from R using magick: the faces of #rstats Twitter, We R-Ladies with Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, and a holiday card for R-Ladies. The faces of #rstats Twitter and holiday card collages were arranged at random, while the We R-Ladies one was a mosaic forming the R-Ladies logo. I got the idea to up my collage skills by trying to learn how to arrange pics by their main colour, like a rainbow. The verb rainbow doesn’t exist, and “rainbowing” doesn’t mean ordering by colour, but I didn’t let this stop me.

It was the occasion to grab some useful knowledge about colours, not useless for someone who did not even know about Pantone’s Colors of the Year a few weeks ago…

This post has nothing to do with Kesha’s new album. However, you can listen to it while reading since it’s so good, but maybe switch to something older from her when I use “$”.

Do you know the Black Metal Cats Twitter account? As explained in this great introduction, it “combines kitties with heavy metal lyrics”. I know the account because I follow Scott Chamberlain who retweets them a lot, which I enjoy as far as one can enjoy such a dark mood. Speaking of which, I decided to try and transform Black Metal Cat tweets into something more positive… The Bubblegum Puppies were born!

You’ve probably seen people posting their #Best9of2017, primarily on Instagram I’d say. I’m not an Instagram user, although I do have an account to spy on my younger sister and cousins, so I don’t even have 9 Instagram posts in total but I do love the collage people get to show off… So what about my best 9 tweets of 2017?

It was recently brought to my attention by Hannah Frick that there are now sooo many R-Ladies chapters around the world! R-Ladies is a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community, and I’m very grateful to be part of this community through which I met so many awesome ladies! Since we’re all connected, it has now happened quite a few times that R-Ladies gave talks at chapters outside of their hometowns. An R-Lady from Taiwan giving a talk in Madrid while on a trip in Europe and another one doing the same in Lisbon, an R-Lady from San Francisco presenting at the London and Barcelona chapters thanks to a conference on the continent, an R-Lady from Uruguay sharing her experience for the New York City and San Francisco chapters… It’s like rockstars tours!

Therefore we R-Ladies often joke about doing an exhaustive global tour. Hannah made me think about this tour again… If someone were to really visit all of the chapters, what would be the shortest itinerary? And could we do a cool gif with the results? These are the problems we solve here.

Recently a reader left a comment on this blog mentioning his cool blog post in which he mapped the spread of a migratory bird using Twitter. His data source was the Waxwings UK account which reports sightings of Bohemian waxwings in the UK. I decided to try reproducing and extending his work using the rOpenSci spocc package that interfaces different sources of species occurrence data.

This week I was impressed by this tweet where Daniel Pett, Digital Humanities Lead at the British Museum, presented a collage of Twitter profile pics of all his colleagues. He made this piece of art using R (for collecting the usernames) and Python. I’m a bit of an R fanatic (or a Python dummy…) so I decided to write a code in R only to make a collage of profile pics of Twitter #rstats users.

In these terrible times, we R people have more important subjects to debate/care about than ggplot2 vs. base R graphics (isn’t even worth discussing anyway, ggplot2 is clearly the best alternative). Or so I thought until I saw CatterPlots trending on Twitter this week and even being featured on Revolutions blog. It was cool because plots with cats are cool, but looking more closely at the syntax of CatterPlots, I couldn’t but realize it was probably a complot to make us all like base R graphics syntax again! So let me show you how to make a cute plot with the awesome ggplot2 extension emojifont.