Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

There has been some interest in the recent release of RStudio 0.96 and especially the ability to use combine its knitr Markdown functionality with Pandoc to integrate R and a variety of different documents types. I just wanted to add two quick things (one mostly aspirational, the other useful) Aspirational: Markdown/Ruby/deck.js I am currently using this combination to put together a presentation based on a recent working paper . Maybe out of procrastination I decided to see if there was any way to use knitr /Markdown to write a deck.js presentation. I generally prefer deck.js to the three Pandoc HTML presentation types ( slidy , S5 , and dzslides ). Deck.js presentations are a pain to write, so it would be great if there was a program like Pandoc that could quickly convert a Markdown file into a deck.js presentation. I discovered that there kind of is. There is a ruby program called deck.rb . The Markdown syntax is really simple and would be familiar to Pandoc users (...

In an earlier post I presented some R  code for a basic way of collecting text from websites. This is a good place to start for collecting text for use in text analysis.  However, it clearly has some limitations;  You need to have all of the URLs already stored in a .csv file. The method of extracting the text from the downloaded HTML code using <gsub> is a bit imprecise. It doesn't remove the text from common links such as "Home" or "About". Both of these problems can be solved in R  with a bit of work. But I think for bigger scrapping projects it is probably a good idea to use other languages such as Python or Ruby .  ProPublica has an excellent little series on scraping  that covers how to gather data from online databases and PDFs. This is a really good public service and enables something sadly unusual in journalism: reproducibility. Their  chapter on using Ruby and Nokogiri for scraping the Phizer's doctor payments disclos...