Publications by Benjamin Smith
RObservations #50: a journey across the United States with {mapBliss}
{mapBliss} is a package initially developed in my attempt to copy the offerings made available by a site (since defunct) called Atlas.co. Recently I was talking about the package in a group chat and someone reached out to me sharing that he traveled to 43 states in the United States and shared with me a list of his journey. These are the visuals th...
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Smith-Pittman Algorithm: Enhancing Community Detection in Networks
Introduction Social network analysis examines individual entities and their relationships among them. The data is represented as a “graph” where individual entities are referred to as “nodes” and their relationships between them as “edges. A primary area of study in SNA is the analysis of interconnectivity of nodes, called ”communities�...
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RObservations #47 : Knitting .Rmd Files to Google Docs with knit2docs
Introduction RMarkdown is a powerful framework for writing a documents that contain a mixture of text, code, and the output of the code. Popular output formats for RMarkdown Documents (.Rmd) include HTML, PDF and Word Documents. It is also possible to output RMarkdown documents as part of a static website using blogdown package and is (still!) poss...
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RObservations #46: Starmaps and Shiny- I Replicated an E-Commerce Store Using My Custom Package, starBliss
Introduction Recently, I released a R package called starBliss that aimed to replicate the output of a e-commerce site called MapsForMoments – a site which lets users order custom prints of the night sky on the date of their choosing (usually a special occasion such as a birthday, first date, wedding etc.) and allows them to choose a style, and a...
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RObservations #45: Making Beautiful Star Maps With The `starBliss` Package
Introduction Continuing my explorations in developing custom map art, I decided to take a detour from developing the mapBliss package to explore another type of map which is very popular in the map-art space- star and constellation maps! This initially started out as an issue opened on the mapBliss Github. However, I quickly realized the framework ...
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RObservations #40 : Packaging My Route Map Code! Introducting mapBliss.
Introduction Around last year I started blogging about Atlas.co and how its possible to imitate their product in R with a some readily available packages and the MapBox API. Recently I managed to take some time and refine and organize the code I had to make the package I call mapBliss. I’m really happy with the package so far because it pretty ...
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RObservations #41: Making a “Matlab Pumkin” in R
Introduction A while back I saw the Mathworks LinkedIn page make a post on how it is possible to make a Pumkin and other autumn gourds with Matlab code (for a more complete list of how to make other autumn Gourds in Matlab, check out Eric Ludlam’s Github repository). Seeing this inspired me to give it a shot in R and explore using 3D graphics w...
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RObservations #44: Adding Frame and Custom Title Support To mapBliss
Introduction The mapBliss package is a R package which I developed which allows for users to make custom souvenir quality maps of their flights, road trips and favorite cities by utilizing the power of the leaflet and other R packages (for a full list, see the Github README here). The goal of the package is to imitate the visualization and print-...
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PythonMusings: Make a Stock/Crypto Ticker Discord Bot with this Simple Script!
With a little bit of time off I decided to explore the discord.py module again with trying to make some of my own Discord bots. The bot I decided to make is a simple stock/crypto ticker bot that tracks the live price of a stock/crypto that I want.This was inspired by the r/Cryptocurrency discord server which had such bots for various cryptocurren...
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Python Musings #7: Simulating FSAs in lieu of real postal code data.
DisclaimerThe following is the same content that I have posted in my other blog on this topic in R, but written in Python. While I actually first wrote the code for doing this in Python, I’ll be posting the similar verbiage from that blog here.IntroductionOften when scraping data, websites will ask a user to enter a postal code to get the locat...
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