Posts

The article describes my experiences with updating the blogdown infrastructure (Hugo and Wowchemy website builder, previously called Academic). I outline two different methods: Building a new blogdown website from scratch and using the Wowchemy update recommendation. The second procedure is much easier but only works starting from Wowchemy version 5.1.0. onwards.

I was pleased finally to see a new R introduction especially directed at social scientists. The book title “Introduction to R for Social Scientists: A Tidy Programming Approach” (abbreviated I2RSS) was promising for me for two reasons. Read the full book review.

R Packages book as a valuable assistance I am pleased: repairData is on CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network! repairData is my first package; offers only five data sets and is therefore not a brilliant feat.

In this post, I summarize my learning problems to advance from an intermediate R level. I suggest finding projects you are interested in and inspecting their codebase at GitHub. In a certain sense, you could use the skills of those experienced persons who guide the project/repository for mentoring your own learning advancement via GitHub. Maybe there is even a possibility of getting involved in the project and learning from relevant real-world challenges. — My example is with R and GitHub, but the learning strategy I recommend here should be usable for other programming languages and other collaborative version control systems.

Three week ago I received via amazon the paperback version of Introduction to Modern Statistics via Amazon. This is one of the rare exceptions where I need — in addition to the online and/or ebook version — the print edition as well.

Mementos are prior versions of web pages cached by web crawlers and stored in web archives. The post explains how to use the Wayback Machine to get back in time and retrieve prior states of a given web resource.

I have investigated the different methods for inserting images into various file formats and conversion procedures. The situation is complex and not easy to grasp. But on a meta-level, the case is pretty straightforward: The decision for a file format is much more important than the details in image handling.

The post investigates different methods to include images in .Rmd files and how they are treated in the blogdown conversion process to .markdown files.

The post investigates different methods to include images in .md files and how they are treated in the Hugo/Goldmark conversion process to HTML.

The post investigates different methods to include images in .Rmd files and how they are treated in the blogdown conversion process to HTML.

What do you have to watch out for your registration with a hosting web service? I take, as an example, the German hoster Uberspace and show the process step-by-step.

Last week – just before Christmas – I received two badges. One from DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and the other one from Wakelet. I thought about a little thank-you gift. What I came up with — killing two birds with one stone — was a Wakelet collection of DORA’s newsletter.

Storify is dead - long live Wakelet! This article features Wakelet, a similar program as the now-defunct Storify. But Wakelet is different in many aspects, and I bet it will stay for many years with us. Firstly it comes with many features Storify has lacked. It is already a full-fledged tool for content curation, presentation, and sharing. Secondly, it has a steadily growing user base where already some of the world’s most prominent organizations are using Wakelet. And the best of it: There is no Premium price model: Wakelet is free in all its functionality.

This blog entry announces the R program coinsR to produce bibliographic metadata automatically for websites within the Hugo framework. The dominant use case at the moment is with the blogdown package.

Citing and visiting web addresses with long URLs is sometimes complicated. Long URLs are particularly a hardness when there are no clickable links but only long strings printed on paper. This article suggests URL shortener to avoid the hurdle mentioned above.

Quoting websites is a hassle for several reasons: Firstly, web pages are not available anymore. Secondly, web pages have moved so that the URL is not valid anymore. Thirdly, they change their content so that the cited reference is not correct anymore. This article presents some strategies and tools to bypass the challenges mentioned above.

This article is the second post of a series of ten contributions about a better understanding of the different aspects of Open Science. I want to collect material to develop a taxonomy of Open Science (TOS). Here I will outline the rationale and significance behind the Open Citation movement. Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They need to be freely accessible, separated from their sources, such as journals, articles or books, machine-readable, and reusable. They have to be open to facilitate research on their structure and relationships.

This post starts a series of ten contributions about a better understanding of the different aspects of Open Science. I want to collect material to develop a taxonomy of Open Science (TOS). The primary goal of this undertaking is not only to build a hierarchical system where every notion is unambiguous but to develop a heuristic tool useful for further research.

With Web 2.0, we see a radical change in scholarly communication. This transition period poses problems for the researcher as the challenges have multiplied. On the one hand, there is a growing need to be present on different web channels (blog, twitter, youtube, and much more). On the other hand, the more traditional ways of publications in high ranked peer review channels are still prevalent. I present in this post a workaround to fulfill both requirements at a certain level: Embed bibliographic metadata in your web pages so that they can be cited and count as a web publication.

The tutorial explains how to use Zotero to produce and embed bibliographic metadata into your web page. An annotated screenshot illustrates each of the 14 simple steps.

Beginning in December 2016, I initiated a new personal enterprise: Learning the statistical programming language R to acquire competencies of a data scientist. The post reports on my experience with a shortcoming on a coursera course and argues that even advanced MOOCs are often not designed to meet the particular requirements of self-determined learners. With the example of learning all the different ways to get data into the R environment, I show that designing different learning paths for different learner needs could be a solution.

Code snippets are text macros which you can insert into your programs. They are used for repetitive tasks and can boost your productivity tremendously. After providing some link to tutorials about RStudio snippets, I am going to summarize eight reminders for practical usage.

By discussing different definitions of ‘Open Science’ quoted in the literature, the post develops a particular perspective: We argue that openness must include not only scientific findings but also the process of knowledge creation. The article is the first of a series and contrasts a holistic understanding of Open Science with the concepts of eScience, Cyberscience or Science 2.0, Libre Science and Open respective Libre Knowledge.

The article reports on my experiences with the premium version of Grammarly, an AI-powered web service for grammar and spell checking. As this is going to be a very positive review, I want to disclose that I am not affiliated in any way with Grammarly Inc., the enterprise behind this product.

How to write comments in markdown?