webscraping on Maëlle Salmon's personal website

Spookify: Halloween Name Generation in R

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s October, time for spooky Twitter names! If you’re on this social media platform, you might have noticed some of your friends switching their names to something spooky and punny. Last year I was “Maelstrom Salmon”, which I find scary but is arguably not that funny. Anyhow, what if you want to switch your name but have no inspiration? In this post, we shall explore R’s abilities to help us with that with the help of webscraping, phonetic spelling and string distance algorithms, and the magic of randomness!

O'Reilly animals in trouble? Conservation status of book covers

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

What can a kaka, a kakapo, an European rabbit and a grey heron have in common? Well, they might co-habit in the bookshelf of an R user, since they’re all animals on the covers of popular R books: “R Packages”, “R for Data Science”, “Text mining with R” and “Efficient R programming”, respectively. Their publisher, O’Reilly, has now based its brand on covers featuring beautiful gravures of animals.

Recently, while wondering what the name of R for Data Science bird was again (I thought it was a kea!), I was thrilled to find the whole O’Reilly menagerie, i.e. a list of books and corresponding animals! The website also features a link to “A short history of the O’Reilly animals” that was an amazing read. In it was noted that “The animals are in trouble.”, with a few examples of endangered species. It inspired me to actually try and assess the conservation status of O’Reilly animals using responsible webscraping, taxonomic name resolving and IUCN Redlist API querying…

ALLSTATisticians in decline? A polite look at ALLSTAT email Archives

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was until recently subscribed to an email list, ALLSTAT, “A UK-based worldwide e-mail broadcast system for the statistical community, operated by ICSE for HEA Statistics.” created in 1998. That’s how I saw the ad for my previous job in Barcelona! Now, I dislike emails more and more so I unsubscribed, but I’d still check out the archives any time I need a job, since many messages are related to openings. Nowadays, I probably identify more as a research software engineer or data scientist than a statistician… which made me wonder, when did ALLSTAT start featuring data scientist jobs? How do their frequency compare to those of statisticians?

In this post, I’ll webscrape and analyse meta-data of ALLSTAT emails. It’ll also be the occasion for me to take the wonderful new polite package for a ride, that helps respectful webscraping!

Really not a fish? Scraping my mathematical family tree

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s nearly been two years since I defended my PhD thesis! On top of allowing me to call myself doctor, having a PhD in statistics gives me the honour to feature in the data of the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Today, I decided to webscrape my mathematical ancestors.

Bad Stock Photos of My Job? Data Science on Pexels

Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t miss the fun Twitter hashtag #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob thanks to a tweet by Julia Silge and another one by Colin Fay. The latter inspired me to actually go and look for what makes a data science photo… What characterizes “data science” stock photos?

Rainbowing a set of pictures

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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 “$”.

Cheer up, Black Metal Cats! Bubblegum Puppies

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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 beautiful, naïve, sophisticated newborn series

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My husband and I recently started watching the wonderful series “Parks and recreation” which was recommended to me by my fellow R-Lady Jennifer Thompson in this very convincing thread. The serie was even endorsed by other R-Ladies. Jennifer told me the first two seasons are not as good as the following ones, but that it was worth it to make it through them. We actually started enjoying the humor and characters right away!

Then, this week while watching the show, one of the characters did a very basic text analysis that made me feel like imitating him for a blog post – my husband told me it was very Leslie of me to plan something while doing something else which made me very proud. I tested my idea on other Leslie fans, and they seemed to think it was a great idea… and that this post should be the beginning of a series of R-Ladies blog posts about Parks and recreation!

In this two-short-part blog post, I’ll therefore inaugurate this series, what an honor!

R-Ladies global tour

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Guardian Experience: heavy or light topics?

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been binge-reading The Guardian Experience columns. I’m a big fan of The Guardian life and style section regulars: the blind dates to which I dedicated a blog post, Oliver Burkeman’s This column will change your life, etc. Experience is another regular that I enjoy a lot. In each of the column, someone tells something remarkable that happened to them. It can really be anything.

I was thinking of maybe scraping the titles and get a sense of most common topics. The final push was my husband’s telling me about this article of Gabriella Paiella’s about the best Guardian Experience columns. She wrote “the “Experience” column does often touch on heavier topics”. Can one know what is the most prevalent “weight” of Experience columns scraping all their titles?