Publications by Ista Zahn
Escaping from character encoding hell in R on Windows
Note: the title of this post was inspired by this question on stackoverflow. This section gives the basic facts and recommendations for importing files with arbitrary encoding on Windows. The issues described here by and large to not apply on Mac or Linux; they are specific to running R on Windows. If you are on a deadline and just need to get ...
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Useless but fun R packages
R is useful for many things. But, it is not only useful! There is plenty of fun to be had as well. In celebration of Summer I’m going to take a look at some useless (but fun!) R packages. Fortune teller fortunes is probably the best-known “just for fun” R package. It is maintained by Achim Zeileis and features contributions from such R lu...
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Extracting content from .pdf files
One of common question I get as a data science consultant involves extracting content from .pdf files. In the best-case scenario the content can be extracted to consistently formatted text files and parsed from there into a usable form. In the worst case the file will need to be run through an optical character recognition (OCR) program to extrac...
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Coming to terms with the pace of change in R
Is it you or have I become old and cranky? I’ve been using R and mostly enjoying it since 2006. Lately I’ve been having some misgivings about the direction R as a community is headed. Some of these misgivings no doubt stem from reluctance to learn new ways of doing things after investing so much time mastering the old ways, but underneath my...
9204 sym R (9108 sym/14 pcs)
Resources for learning R (from workshops to reference cards)
A list of resources for learning R in preparation for CS109 this Spring. A wealth of R resources are available, and I’m sure I’ve missed some really good ones. If you have a favorite tutorial or resource that is not listed here, please email me or submit a bug report or pull request to http://github.com/izahn/blog. Workshops ...
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My Data Science Tool Box
This post describes the tools I currently use for working with data. People often ask me to recommend specific tools, and I always hesitate, because so much boils down to personal preference. I recently added a workshop to the DSS lineup providing an overview of popular tools for working with data. The core idea is that researchers have a lot of ...
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