Wikipedia

Names of b.....s badder than Taylor Swift, a class in women's studies?

Once again, a Twitter trend sent me to my R prompt… Here is a bit of context. My summary: Taylor Swift apparently plays the bad girl in her new album and a fan of hers asked a question…

The tweet was then quoted by many people mentioning badass women, and I decided to have a look at these heroes!

Who are the Swedish radio P1 summer guests? Answer via Wikidata

This week, a very promising new R blog was launched, namely the blog of Eric Persson a.k.a as expersso on Twitter. I had really been looking forward to this because expersso’s code screenshots have always been quite cool, so seeing his no longer being limited to them is awesome! His first articles series is about a game, you should really check it out. (PSA: if you post screenshots of R code on Twitter, have a look at Sean Kross’ codefinch package!).

Because I’m a nosy person I asked Eric whether he was Swedish, his last name being quite Swedish-looking in my opinion. He is, which made me wonder about Swedish blog topics and actually decided to use one Swedish topic I came up with, the summer guests of the Swedish radio P1! Every summer since 1959, P1 selects a bunch of famous or interesting people and have them record a bit more than one hour program where they’re free to discuss what they want (important events of their life for instance) and to choose the musical breaks (which you don’t get to listen entirely to in the online version because of copyright stuff). The program is then broadcasted in the summer, one guest a day from the end of June to the beginning of August. There’s even a winter version now but I’ll ignore it because it’s too hot here in Barcelona to even think about winter.

It’s a very cool radio program in my opinion. I discovered it at the end of my 5-month research stay in Gothenburg in 2010 and decided it’d be one way to keep my Swedish skills up to date (my other methods include listening to ABBA in Swedish and reading Camilla Läckberg’s novels). I haven’t listened to that many guests but I really enjoy it when I do, and I like how diverse the list of guests is. In this post, I’ll actually try to have a look at the occupations of the guests via Wikidata!

Extracting notable deaths from Wikipedia

I like Wikipedia. My husband likes it even more, he included it in his PhD thesis acknowledgements! I appreciate the efforts done for sharing knowledge, and also the apparently random stuff you can find on the website. In particular, I’ve been intrigued by the monthly lists of notable deaths such as this one. Who are people (or dogs, yes, dogs) whose life was deemed notable enough to be listed there? Also, using the numbers of such deaths, can I judge whether 2016 was really worse than previous years? The first step in answering these questions was to scrape the data. I’ll describe the process in this post. In another post I’ll have a look at my study population and in a third post I’ll analyse the time series of death counts.