21 September 2017 - For a post on analysing networks of corporate control, I wanted to create some network graphs with d3.js. The new edition of Scott Murray’s great book on d3.js, which is updated to version 4, contains a good example to get you started. However, I was still struggling with some practical issues, as the chart below illustrates (reload the page to see the problem develop).

11 April 2017 - One of my colleagues needs tables extracted from a few hundred PDFs. There’s an excellent tool called Tabula that I frequently use, but you have to process each PDF manually. However, it turns out you can also automate the process. For those like me who didn’t know, here’s how it works.

5 May 2016 - For a number of reasons, I like to use D3.js for my charts. However, I’ve been struggling for a while to get them to behave properly on my blog which has a responsive theme. I may have found a solution.

10 February 2015 - With the help of posts by Hillary Parker and trestletech I managed to create my first R package in RStudio (here’s why) . It wasn’t as difficult as I thought and it seems to work. Below is a basic step-by-step description of how I did it (this assumes you have one or more R functions to include in your package, preferably in separate R-script files):

5 July 2014 - Some websites offer data that you can download as an Excel or CSV file (e.g., Eurostat), or they may offer structured data in the form of an API. Other websites contain useful information, but they don’t provide that information in a convenient form. In such cases, a webscraper may be the tool to extract that information and store it in a format that you can use for further analysis.