Publications by Will
There is no Such Thing as Biomedical "Big Data"
At the moment, the world is obsessed with “Big Data” yet it sometimes seems that people who use this phrase don’t have a good grasp of its meaning. Like most good buzz-words, “Big Data” sparks the idea of something grand and complicated, while sounding ordinary enough that listeners feel like they have an intuitive understanding of th...
7168 sym 2 img
Getting R and Java 1.8 to work together on OSX
Hey Mac OSX users with Java 1.8 installed. Did R just request a Java 1.6 installation and then promptly crash your session? If so, read on… The Problem A few days ago I was attempting to use the mallet package for topic models and I found that typing > library(mallet) caused two things to happen: The operating system launches a dialog aski...
1563 sym R (403 sym/5 pcs)
Identifying the OS from R
Sometimes a bit of R code needs to know what operating system it’s running on. Here’s a short account of where you can find this information and a little function to wrap the answer up neatly. Operating systems are a platform issue, so let’s start with the constants in the list .Platform. For Windows the OS.type is just “windows”, bu...
2944 sym R (338 sym/1 pcs)
Packaging the TheyWorkForYou API
TheyWorkForYou is a great website for keeping up with British politics and one of the many fine things mySociety does to make democracy in the UK more transparent. There’s also an API, accessible via http and wrapped up for a few languages. However, R is not amongst them, so I wrote twfy. If you’re interested in using it (and you’ve got dev...
6810 sym R (1952 sym/12 pcs)
Configuring Azure and RStudio for text analysis
I just finished teaching Computer-Assisted Content Analysis at the IQMR summer school at Syracuse. With three lecture and three labs the problem every year is getting the right R packages onto people’s machines. In particular, anything that involves compilation – and when you’re using quanteda, readtext, and stm, that’s lots of things –...
9151 sym Python (1474 sym/17 pcs) 10 img