Posts

COVID Countdown! Building a Shiny Dashboard to Track Vaccinations in Canada

Trudeau has committed to vaccinating every willing Canadian against COVID-19 by September. So how’s it going so far? I built a dashboard to find out, and, well…
Last updated on Feb 4, 2021 6 min read

Pardon Me? Analyzing Trump's Presidential Pardons

Presidential pardons have been all over the news this week, since Donald Trump issued a number of of them on his way out the door. But how does his use of the pardon power compare to that of past Presidents? The answer might surprise you!
Last updated on Jan 26, 2021 28 min read

Interactive COVID-19 Simulation: The Effects of Physical Distancing on Transmission

This interactive simulation lets you explore how different levels of physical distancing affect the transmission of COVID-19.
Last updated on Jan 18, 2021 5 min read

A Fast, Effective, and Simple Classification Model for Customer Reviews

This post presents a new, simple, fast, and effective model for predicting a Yelp review’s star rating from its review text, including an interactive demonstration app and a downloadable R package.
Last updated on Jan 2, 2021 14 min read

Tidy Geocoding in R: Two New Functions

This post introduces two custom functions for geocoding in R: one using the City of Ottawa’s free geocoding service, and one using Google’s geocoding API. I provide instructions on how to install the functions, some code examples, and interactive maps.
Last updated on Jan 2, 2021 5 min read

Two Ways to Count Points in Polygons with R

How many bikes were stolen in your neighbourhood last year? The City of Ottawa reports individual bike thefts here, but it would be nice to have a fast way to aggregate those points into polygons so we can analyze and visualize them.
Last updated on Oct 15, 2020 9 min read

Web Scraping in R: Selenium, FireFox, and PhantomJS

This tutorial will show you how to scrape web pages in R using the packages RSelenium and wdman. We’ll cover both browser-enabled scraping using Firefox and “headless” scraping using PhantomJS.
Last updated on Sep 17, 2020 13 min read

OCTranspo Route Mapping in R: Part 1

In this post I’m going to explain how to start using R’s tidytransit package to plan trips on OCTranspo, Ottawa’s public transit system. OCTranspo makes a lot of its data available online, but they leave out a key file called transfers.
Last updated on Sep 17, 2020 8 min read

Connecting GitHub to Netlify with the Academic Theme

I’m making a quick post now to record some of the pain points I hit trying to get the initial version of this site up and running. Connecting RStudio to GitHub I’m making a note of this here because I always have trouble getting RStudio to sync with GitHub initially, and then forget what the problem was when it’s time for me to set up a new project.
Last updated on Jul 9, 2020 2 min read