New tools or tricks I’ve learned and need to remember
One of my hard drives is down to its final terabyte, of 8, so its time for me to compress some files. Since I have thousands of files on that drive, it would be inefficient to select them one by one. It turns out its easy to pass a bunch of files to gzip. I […]
My Twitter pipeline collects the tweets with R but processes them with Python, but tor the event data class I just taught at APSA (material available here), I wanted to keep all of the code in R. I therefore needed to replace my Python code with R code that would open text files containing raw […]
It’s quite common for me to have a figure that takes up an entire page. Latex always has trouble placing that page’s number: it usually puts it in the top right. I finally found a Stack Exchange answer that works for me: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/238469/page-numbering-on-bottom-center-on-full-page-figure. What’s also cool is that the overfull messages I would get may […]
My research uses Twitter to understand the dynamics of protest and state violence, which also means I think a lot about media coverage. I have a few thoughts on recent events. TL;DR: There is very little looting going on across the United States. There are lots and lots of peaceful protests and protesters. You would […]
Like almost every other academic, I have started a Covid-19 project. I think my team has a unique angle because of the kind of data I collect. One dynamic we are interested in is patterns of following, and being able to analyze that across enough accounts required me to work with Twitter endpoints I have […]
I recently spent a lot of time reviewing my Twitter data collection infrastructure in order to start some more collections. In that process, I discovered some tokens and streams I forgot about. The purpose of this post is to document what data I am collecting as of 04.29.2020 so that I have an easy reference […]
In responding to recent comments on a paper, I went looking for information on how prevalent Twitter is across the world. Based on my work using geolocated images from Twitter, I had a sense that it tracks population and per capita GDP closely. But I have not had the time to investigate the relationship more […]
It is common for academic articles to have a Supplementary Material section to provide evidence or discussion in support of the main argument that space constraints do not allow to be published with the article. The Supplementary Materials in turn often have their own citations separate from the manuscript. This post details how to create […]
I recently had a large dataset where I wanted to make a series of plots with different variables on the y-axis. I remembered that a few years ago I great frustrated that I could not do this with ggplot, so I moved on. This time, I was successful. The key, as this Stack Overflow answer […]
While I have my issues with the tidyverse, one feature I am enamored with is the ability to assign values to observations in grouped data without aggregating the data. This assigning is done by using the mutate() command instead of summarize(). I am in the middle of some data processing in a Python pipeline where I […]
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