Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

As Markus Gesmann recently pointed out , the new version of RStudio (0.96) has some really nice features for creating dynamic reports with Yihui Xie ’s knitr . You can integrate not just R and LaTeX , but also R and Markdown (as well as some other formats). If you haven’t used Markdown before, it’s basically a really simplified syntax for writing web content, though it can easily be converted not just to HTML but also LaTeX and other formats with Pandoc . See this post by Yihui Xie for a discussion of how to make HTML presentations with knitr and Pandoc. These programs make it much easier to create HTML presentations that display interactive R output from packages like googleVis (like I did in an earlier post ). I’ve been using RStudio ’s new features in the preview version for a few weeks and it has been really great. It has made creating web content much easier. I’ve even decided to pretty much move my entire introductory data analysis...

This post by Mario Pineda-Krch complains about the woeful lack of reproducibility in computational sciences. This reminded me of Jake Bowers 's good piece in the Political Methodologist from earlier this year about how to do reproducible computational political science. The article actually inspired me to completely switch over all of my new writing to Sweave . Sweave allows you to combine your R code and LaTeX documents. If you make your Sweave document and data available to readers they can completely reproduce everything in your article: the models, the table, the graphs, everything.  RStudio makes using Sweave really easy (though I still use a text editor for writing much of the code since RStudio doesn't do spellcheck).  Political economy and political science journals don't seem to have been keeping up with these developments. In fact, poli sci journals often require MS Word documents and don't allow you to submit Sweave documents. Few journ...