I’m happy to announce that rwhatsapp is now on CRAN. After being tested by users on GitHub for a year now, I decided it is time to make the package available to a wider audience. The goal of the package is to make working with ‘WhatsApp’ chat logs as easy as possible.
‘WhatsApp’ seems to become increasingly important not just as a messaging service but also as a social network—thanks to its group chat capabilities.
Some time ago, I saw a presentation by Wouter van Atteveldt who showed that wordclouds aren’t necessarily stupid. I was amazed since wordclouds were one of the first things I ever did in R and they are still often shown in introductions to text analysis. But the way they are mostly done is, in fact, not very informative. Because the position of the individual words in the cloud do not mean anything, the only information communicated is through the font size and sometimes font colour of the words.
My PhD supervisor once told me that everyone doing newspaper analysis starts by writing code to read in files from the ‘LexisNexis’ newspaper archive. However, while I do recommend this exercise, not everyone has the time.
These are the first words of the introduction to my first R package, LexisNexisTools. My PhD supervisor was also my supervisor for my master dissertation and he said these words before he gave me my very first book about R.
A while ago I was building a database of newspaper articles retrieved from LexisNexis for a research project in which I was working as a research assistant. At some point we noticed that we seemed to have a lot of duplicates in our database. I had already removed the duplicates with R so we were really surprised that those are still in there. However, after some investigation, I found that there are indeed small differences between the articles we had identified manually as duplicates in our data.