Publications by R | JLaw's R Blog
Heatmapping My New York City Marathon Training
Motivation This post was inspired by my wife who used the GPS data from her Strava app to plot her running routes during 2020. Since I don’t run nearly as much as I used to, I need to go back to when I was training for the NYC marathon to find enough running to make such a map worthwhile. Also presenting a challenge is that I’m a bit of a lud...
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What % of Manhattan Did I Run Through?
In a previous post I created a cool-looking (in my opinion) heatmap of my Marathon training from years back. One of the downsides to that density-based method of making the heat map was that routes I only ran once didn’t show up very clearly. I also wanted to know roughly what % of Manhattan I covered in my runs. This post will use that same da...
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Scraping Google Play Reviews with RSelenium
When Normal Web Scraping Just Won’t Work I’ve used rvest in numerous posts to scrape information from static websites or through forms to get data. However, some websites don’t have static data that can be downloaded by just scraping the HTML. Google Play Store reviews are one of these sources. Reviews on the Google Play Store have what I c...
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How have the AFI Top 30 Movies Changed Between 1998 and 2007?
During COVID I’ve started watching some older “classic” movies that I hadn’t seen before but felt for whatever reason I should have seen as a movie fan. Last week, I had watched The Third Man after listening to a podcast about Spy Movies. After watching it I was surprised to find out that while it was named the Top British Film of All-Tim...
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What Are People Sayin’ About Instagram Lite?
In the beginning of May, I used RSelenium to scrape the Google Play Store reviews for Instagram Lite to demonstrate how the package can be used to automate browser behavior. Its taken longer than I had initially planned to do this follow-up on the analysis of that data. But better late than never. So in this analysis I will do some exploratory wo...
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Celebrating the Blog’s First Birthday With googleAnalyticsR
On July 4th, 2020, I posted the first article to this humble R blog as a small hobby to do something new while working from home through COVID. Very recently, this blog celebrated its first year and I wanted to leverage Google Analytics to do a look back at the last year, what’s done well as well as when and where people were visiting from. Muc...
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How to not have Plot.ly Inflate Hugo’s Reading Time
I’m a big proponent of enabling the reading time option on this blog which uses Hugo’s academic theme. I always appreciate seeing it on other blogs so I know how much time to invest in the post. I also like it because its a feedback mechanism for me to try to write more concisely. But having too long a reading time at the beginning of a post ...
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$GME To The Moon: How Much of an Outlier Was Gamestop’s January Rise?
Introduction Between January 13th and January 27th, 2021 the stock price for Gamestop (GME) rose 10x from $31 to $347 dollars. This rise was in part due to increased popularity on the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets looking to create a short squeeze and because they “liked the stock”. This rapid rise also drew attention of popular media such as...
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Finding the Eras of MTV’s The Challenge Through Clustering
Since 1998, MTV’s The Challenge (formerly the Real World/Road Rules Challenge) has graced the airwaves where it is currently in Season 37. In a prior post I had mentioned that this is one of my guilty pleasure shows so this will likely not be the last post that is based around America’s 5th professional sport. For casting the show, the early ...
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What’s the Most American of American Films? An Analysis with {gt} and {gtExtras}
I love movies. I enjoy watching them, I enjoy reading about the industry (sometimes), and as a bit of a data-nerd (exhibit a: my blog), I enjoy learning about the outliers in the industry. One of my favorite trends to follow is the shifting dynamics of Hollywood being driven more by International Box Office and the impact this has on the types of...
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