David Ranzolin

I’ve been encountering lists of data frames both at work and at play. Most of the time, I need only bind them together with dplyr::bind_rows() or purrr::map_df(). But recently I’ve needed to join them by a shared key. This operation is more complex. In fact, I admitted defeat earlier this... [Read More]

Last week I had the good fortune of attending my first CAIR–no, not the Council on American-Islamic Relations, but the California Association for Institutional Research. Over 300 administrators, analysts, and data nerds decended upon the Millenium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to network, share tips and tricks, and even watch... [Read More]

Chances are that you now hate politics. “E-mails” makes you perspire, and every Halloween pumpkin bore an eerie resemblance to the Republican nominee. So why not channel that hate into something productive, like building interactive web applications and/or learning more about your elected officials? In other words, why not make... [Read More]

I have a habit of boasting about R’s innumerable merits. One day, I was celebrating the arrival of a particular R package when my wife stopped and asked me why–if R was so great–can’t it build her an online catalog for her library? I accepted the challenge without hesitation, being... [Read More]

How diverse is your student body? A tour through some classrooms may give you some idea. But how diverse is your student body in relation to the school across town? To answer that question, you need a more precise measure. Enter Ethnic Diversity Index (EDI), a reflection of how evenly... [Read More]

At long last we come to the end of this series. I confess that I lost interest when–spoiler alert–there was nothing exciting to report here. But for the sake of symmetry, here in Part III we’ll delve into the tweets themselves with the awesome tidytext package. [Read More]