R and Google spreadsheets are powerful partners for verification, exploration and delivery of data to people in communities and organizations. Recently I wrote a convenience wrapper around the gs_upload function in Jenny Bryan’s wonderful googlesheets package.  But it takes some context to explain how I use it the way I do and why I think it’s important, so this […]

I’m resonating with how Joitske Hulsebosch has organized “Tools for social network analysis from beginners to advanced levels.”  It’s always safer when you can start at “the shallow end of the pool” and get into deeper and deeper water as you go.  In diving into the real-life river of data, we may not know just […]

Tags: Googleapps, OpenRefine

Do we ever use all the data that’s out there (and that we generate every day) for the benefit of our communities?  How could the data that we generate help our communities see themselves in new or more useful ways?  The burgeoning new industry around Big Data is built on the premise that collection is […]

This idea and the code to implement it may be useful in other settings, but I developed it in the context of supporting a community with a largely volunteer organization at its center.   At least in my mind the code comes from a point of view. Here’s a picture of what it does: Here […]

Over the years I’ve accumulated more than 1,000 links in http://delicious.com/smithjd.   Delicious (in its various versions) was my preferred tool  for storing,  retrieving, and sharing bookmarks.  Far better than bookmarking things in a browser.  But I’ve gotten impatient with the delicious browser widget in Chrome (and the website was just too much overhead) so I […]

Here are two handy Perl scripts that I’ve developed, one of them some years ago and the other a few weeks ago.  This zip file perl-scripts-prp-and-csplit contains a “readme.txt”, the Perl scripts and sample input files. The prp.pl script scoops up many files and does many global search and replace edits in place using character strings in […]