This is the fourth blog post in a series of dplyr tutorials. In this tutorial we will summarizing our data: i) counting cases and observations, ii) creating summaries using summarise() and it’s summarise_all(), _if() and _at() variants, and iii) pulling the maximum and minimum row values.

Yesterday marked my four months membership of GitHub. Back then, I had seen many GitHub repos pass by after joining Twitter a few weeks earlier, and I wanted to star some of them to find them back more easily. It took another 23 days before I actually committed something myself. Now, four months later, I use GitHub (private) and GitLab (work) as good as daily, and I have inspired others to start using it.

This is the third blog post in a series of dplyr tutorials. In this post, we will cover how to filter your data. Apart from the basics of filtering, it covers some more nifty ways to filter numerical columns with near() and between(), or string columns with regex.

Sometimes you dream big, but you just don’t have the data… I had this plan for text analysis by character from the Parks & Recreation series to celebrate Galentine’s Day but getting the data was a struggle. Subtitles are available for pretty much every episode but those don’t contain data about the character who said the lines. I needed scripts, which are a bit harder to come by. I found 6 scripts of episodes on the web from the first 3 seasons in pdf format that were usable.

This is a second post in a series of dplyr functions. It covers tools to manipulate your columns to get them the way you want them: this can be the calculation of a new column, changing a column into discrete values or splitting/merging columns.

I went through the entire dplyr documentation for a talk last week about pipes, which resulted in a few “aha!” moments. I discovered and re-discovered a few useful functions, which I wanted to collect in a few blog posts so I can share them with others.

This first post will cover ordering, naming and selecting columns, it covers the basics of selecting columns and more advanced functions like select_all(), select_if() and shortcuts like everything().

I was busy on a little side project on radio playlists when the news broke about the death of Dolores O’Riordan, front singer of The Cranberries. And sure enough, a few hours later I could see The Cranberries starting to pop up in the playlists. Their second album No Need to Argue was one of my favourite CD’s as a teenager, and so I wondered: how many times would they be played?

At the end of the year, everyone is making lists. And radio stations are no exceptions. Many of our radio stations have a weekly “people’s choice” music chart. Throughout the week, people submit their top 3 recent songs, and every week those votes turn into a music chart. At the end of the year, they collapse all those weekly charts into a larger one covering the entire year.

It seems that we Belgians just love confusing foreigners… Imagine wanting to take a train to Mons from Ghent but there only is one driving to Bergen. Or driving south with a GPS telling you to follow the direcion of Liège, but for a while you will only see signs to Luik. Mons/Bergen, Liège/Luik, Ypres/Ieper… those names refer to exactly the same city - one of them is the official French name, the other one the official Dutch one.

What I was wondering: are there still Joke’s born in Belgium? Every time I pass by a colleague named Joke, I wonder. Let me explain: Joke is quite regular Dutch first name for a girl. You pronounce it [yo-ke], like blending ‘yoghurt’ and ‘kebab’ together and put the accent on the ‘yo’. ‘Joke’ is just a diminutive form of Jo, kind of like Jenny, Abby and Debby. No-one who grew up speaking Dutch would bat an eye to hear about someone named Joke, but everyone else on this planet probably would.