Publications by Cory Nissen
Finding Named Entities using R
Occasionally, I’ll need to pick out names (first name, last name) from text. These days, the text I’m working with is usually tweets. Any how, I didn’t see any solution out there (that worked for me) when I developed this, so hopefully it can be a starting point for somebody else with similar needs…First, I start out with a li...
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Visualizing Bus Stops with rCharts
I wanted to create a quick visualization of Bloomington IL bus stops. This data is in pdf file format spread across multiple files. The first step, before any mapping can occur, is downloading those files, parsing them to get the bus stop locations and times.First, I need to get a list of all of the files. This was a little complicate...
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Making an R Package to use the HERE geocode API
HERE is a product by Nokia, formerly called Nokia maps and before that, Ovi maps. It's the result of the acquisition of NAVTEQ in 2007 combined with Plazes and Metacarta, among others. It has a geocoding API, mapping tiles, routing services, and other things. I'm focused on the geocoding service. Under the “Base” license, you can run 10,000 g...
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geocodeHERE 0.1 is on CRAN
In my previous blog post, I detailed how I created my first R package called geocodeHERE. This package is a convenient wrapper for Nokia's HERE geocoding API. The cool thing about this API is that it allows for bulk geocoding. So, instead of doing n API calls to geocode n addresses, you can do it with just a couple API calls. Also, you can run 10...
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Using rvest to Scrape an HTML Table
I recently had the need to scrape a table from wikipedia. Normally, I'd probably cut and paste it into a spreadsheet, but I figured I'd give Hadley's rvest package a go. The first thing I needed to do was browse to the desired page and locate the table. In this case, it's a table of US state populations from wikipedia. Rvest needs to know what t...
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R Package to Download Fitbit Data
Fitbit is a device that tracks your daily activity. It's basically a pedometer, but it does a little more. It has an altimeter, so it can count flight of stairs climbed. It can detect your sleeping activity and give you a read on how often you are tossing and turning. Any how, I received a Fitbit One for Christmas and have been unexpectedly into ...
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Creating Styled Google Maps in ggmap
In R, my go to package for creating maps is ggmap. Using this, one can create maps using a variety of services, including Google maps. I just recently discovered the ability to create a styled version of a Google map. Let's go through this process to create a black and white map of Chicago, with the parks shown in red. First, go to the Styled Map...
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