R User Groups on GitHub

by Joseph Rickert

Quite a few times over the past few years I have highlighted presentations posted by R user groups on their websites and recommended these sites as a source for interesting material, but I have never thought to see what the user groups were doing on GitHub. As you might expect, many people who make presentations at R user group meetings make their code available on GitHub. However as best as I can tell, only a few R user groups are maintaining GitHub sites under the user group name.

The Indy UseR Group is one that seems to be making very good use of their GitHub Site. Here is the link to a very nice tutorial from Shankar Vaidyaraman on using the rvest package to do some web scraping with R. The following code which scrapes the first page from Springer's Use R! series to produce a short list of books comes form Shankar's simple example. 

# load libraries
library(rvest)
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
 
# link to Use R! titles at Springer site
useRlink = "http://www.springer.com/?SGWID=0-102-24-0-0&series=Use+R&sortOrder=relevance&searchType=ADVANCED_CDA&searchScope=editions&queryText=Use+R"
 
# Read the page
userPg = useRlink %>% read_html()
 
## Get info of books displayed on the page
booktitles = userPg %>% html_nodes(".productGraphic img") %>% html_attr("alt")
bookyr = userPg %>% html_nodes(xpath = "//span[contains(@class,'renditionDescription')]") %>% html_text()
bookauth = userPg %>% html_nodes("span[class = 'displayBlock']") %>% html_text()
bookprice = userPg %>% html_nodes(xpath = "//div[@class = 'bookListPriceContainer']//span[2]") %>% html_text()
pgdf = data.frame(title = booktitles, pubyr = bookyr, auth = bookauth, price = bookprice)
pgdf

 

 This plot,which shows a list of books ranked by number of downloads, comes from Shankar's extended recommender example.

The Ann Arbor R User Group meetup site has done an exceptional job of creating an aesthetically pleasing and informative web property on their GitHub site.

I am particularly impressed with the way they have integrated news, content and commentary into their "News" section. Scroll down the page and have look at the care taken to describe and document the presentations made to the group. I found the introduction and slides for Bob Carpenter's RStan presentation very well done.

Other RUGs active on GitHub include:

• Cambridge R User Group: meetup site and GitHub site
• Inland Northwest R User Group: GitHub only
• Twin Cities R User Group: meetup site and GitHub site
• UVa R Users Group: meetup site and GitHub site

If your R user group is on GitHub and I have not included you in my short list please let me know about it. I think RUG GitHub sites have the potential for creating a rich code sharing experience among user groups. If you would like some help getting started with GItHub have a look at tutorials on the Murdoch University R User Group webpage.

 

Comments

[Daniel Emaasit]

Here are Github pages to a few groups that I am involved with:

1. Las Vegas R Users Group: https://github.com/DataScienceLV/R-UsersGroup

2. Data Science Africa: https://github.com/datascience-africa

[Joseph Rickert]

Thank You Daniel!
Best regards,

[yves crutain]

At the LondonR coding-dojo meetup, we have a github repository where people put the R code created during the session:

github.com/London-R-Dojo/Dojo-repo

And the last session, we have created a process to allow people attending the coding-dojo to publish the rmd files created on the jekyll website of the coding-dojo, hosted on github:

london-r-dojo.github.io/2016/01/rmarkdown-intro-coding-dojo.html

Awesome hack.

[Joseph Rickert]

Many thanks for pointing us to the LondonR GitHub repos!
There is some nice material here.

Let me know if you would like to write a guest blog post about your process for allowing people to publish rmd files on the jelyll website.

[email protected]

[Gabriela]

Hi Joe,

R-ladies meetup: https://github.com/R-ladies

Thanks,
Gabriela

[Joseph Rickert]

Very nice!
Thank you Gabriela.

How about writing a guest post about R Ladies? I think the experiences, goals and aspirations of R Ladies would be of wide interest.
Best

[Konstantin]

Hi Joe,

the Berlin RUG also has a respository with materials of (almost) all our talks: http://berlinrug.github.io/BerlinRUG/

Best regards
Konstantin

[Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez]

Our SevillaR group also has a GitHub profile (https://github.com/SevillaR) where we store presentations and code from our monthly meetings.

We also have other projects in there, such as couple of packages we developed in a recent hackathon.

Regards,

Paco