Summarizing rstudio::conf 2019 Summaries with Tidy Text Techniques

To be honest, I planned on writing a review of this past weekend’s rstudio::conf 2019, but several other people have already done a great job of doing that—just check out Karl Broman’s aggregation of reviews at the bottom of the page here! (More on this in a second.) In short, my thoughts on the whole experience are captured perfectly by Nick Strayer’s tweet the day after the conference ended.

Thing I learned at #Rstudioconf that sticks out to me the most: it turns out that this group of people who are so kind and welcoming online are also kind and welcoming in real life. More than any library or api that’s what makes #rstats great.

— Nick Strayer (@NicholasStrayer) January 19, 2019

Anyways, I figured that this was the perfect opportunity to do some “tidy text analysis”! Why not extract the text from the reviews of others—linked in Karl’s repo—and make “my own” summary of the event? Plotting word frequencies and sentiments, while not exactly “cutting edge” compared to robust NLP techniques, is perfect for getting a nice, simple overview of the conference. (I have applied some of the techniques described by David Robinson and Julia Silge in their Tidy Text Mining with R book more than once in the past, but not recently, and not on this topic.)

Moreover, after reading Bob Rudis’s recent post and discovering his work-in-progress “ {curl} +{httr} + {rvest}“ package called {reapr}, I realized that the work of cleaning the HTML and text for each person’s blog post would not be so bad. In fact, it turned out to be as easy as reapr::reap_url() %>% reapr::mill() (with only a little bit of extra work ????)!

After trying a couple of different approaches (e.g. bigrams, topic modeling, etc.) and experimenting with some different visualizations, I ended up making the two plots below. (To the interested reader, I’ve included all of the code at the bottom of this post.) From the second plot—where positive sentiment heavily outweighs negative sentiment—one thing is clear: the R community is super supportive and positive, just as Nick alluded to in his tweet.

I’ve said it before and I’ll happily said it again: thanks again to David Robinson and Julia Silge for their great Tidy Text Mining with R book and everything else that they’ve done for the community! The techniques that they’ve documented and shared are super helpful for doing a quick exploration just like this.

# Reference for adding appendix: https://yihui.name/en/2018/09/code-appendix/
DIR_POST <- "content/post/rstudio-conf-2019-summary"
PATH_SANS_EXT <- "index-to-render"
PATH_RMD <- file.path(DIR_POST, paste0(PATH_SANS_EXT, ".Rmd"))
PATH_OUTPUT <- file.path(DIR_POST, paste0(PATH_SANS_EXT, ".md"))

# PATH_R <- paste0(PATH_SANS_EXT, ".R")
# rmarkdown::render(knitr::spin(PATH_R, knit = FALSE))

# # Spell-checking.
# spelling::spell_check_files(PATH_RMD)

# # Convert from Rmd to output specified in YAML.
# rmarkdown::render(PATH_RMD, output_file = PATH_OUTPUT, output_dir = DIR_POST, knit_root_dir = DIR_POST, intermediates_dir = DIR_POST)
# rmarkdown::render(PATH_RMD)
# rmarkdown::render(PATH_RMD, output_file = PATH_OUTPUT)

knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = here::here(DIR_POST))
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  echo = FALSE,
  cache = FALSE,
  include = FALSE,
  fig.show = "hide",
  fig.align = "center",
  fig.width = 4.5,
  fig.asp = 1.5,
  warning = FALSE,
  message = FALSE
)
library("tidyverse")
library("teplot")
# library("hrbrthemes")
# theme_set(teplot::theme_te())
url <- "https://github.com/kbroman/RStudioConf2019Slides/blob/master/ReadMe.md"
page <- url %>% reapr::reap_url()

nodes_p <- page$parsed_html %>%  rvest::html_nodes("p") 
# nodes_p %>% rev() %>% magrittr::extract(1:20)

extract_nodes_after <- function(x, pattern) {
  stopifnot(class(x) == "xml_nodeset")
  text <- rvest::html_text(x)
  mask <- str_detect(text, pattern)
  mask <- dplyr::cumany(mask)
  x[mask]
}

nodes_blogposts <-
  nodes_p %>%
  extract_nodes_after("^Jacqueline Nolis")

str_subset_inv <- function(string, pattern, invert = TRUE) {
  setdiff(string, str_subset(string, pattern))
}

extract_nodes_without <- function(x, pattern) {
  stopifnot(class(x) == "xml_nodeset")
  text <- rvest::html_text(x)
  res <- str_subset_inv(text, pattern)
  res
}

# nodes_blogposts %>% rvest::html_text()
# nodes_blogposts %>% rvest::html_nodes("a") %>% rvest::html_text()

links <-
  nodes_blogposts %>% 
  rvest::html_nodes("a") %>% 
  rvest::html_attr("href") %>% 
  str_subset_inv("twitter|reources")

mdtext <- nodes_blogposts %>% rvest::html_text()  
authors <- mdtext %>% str_extract("(^[^,]+)")
# titles <- mdtext %>% str_replace("(^.*)\\,[\\s\\n]+(.*$)", "\\2")

blogposts <-
  tibble(
    idx_blog = seq.int(1L, length(authors)),
    author = authors,
    link = links
  )
blogposts

# Exclude Nolis and Lopp due to difficulty with Medium articles.
# Exclude Cortina because it is an "analysis" type of article.
# Exclude Nantz because it is just a description of a podcast.
blogposts_filt <-
  blogposts %>% 
  filter(!str_detect(author, "Nolis|Lopp|Cortina|Nantz"))

blogposts_content <-
  blogposts_filt %>% 
  mutate(content = purrr::map(link, ~reapr::reap_url(.x) %>% reapr::mill()))
blogposts_content
# content1 <-
#   blogposts %>%
#   slice(2) %>%
#   pull(link) %>%
#   reapr::reap_url() %>%
#   reapr::mill()
# 
# tokens1 <-
#   content1 %>% 
#   str_split("\\n") %>% 
#   enframe(name = "line", value = "text") %>% 
#   unnest() %>% 
#   # Still some empty lines to remove.
#   filter(text != "") %>% 
#   # tidytext::unnest_tokens(output = "word", text)
#   tidytext::unnest_tokens(output = "ngram", input = text, token = "ngrams", n = 3)
# tokens1
tidy_1post <-
  function(text) {
    text %>%
      str_split("\\n") %>% 
      enframe(name = "line", value = "text") %>% 
      unnest() %>% 
      # Still some empty lines to remove.
      filter(text != "") %>% 
      # For unigrams.
      tidytext::unnest_tokens(output = "word", input = text)
    # For bigrams.
      # tidytext::unnest_tokens(output = "ngram", input = text, token = "ngrams", n = 2)
  }

posts_tokenized <-
  blogposts_content %>%
  select(-link) %>% 
  mutate(tokens = purrr::map(content, tidy_1post))
posts_tokenized
tokens <-
  posts_tokenized %>%
  select(author, tokens) %>% 
  unnest(tokens)
tokens

stopwords_base <- tidytext::get_stopwords()
# stopwords_base <- tidytext::get_stopwords(source = "smart")

# Remove the numbers used for ordered lists as well as html-related things
# (mostly from Medium posts?).
stopwords_custom <-
  as.character(0:9) %>%
  # c(
  #   "https",
  #   "url",
  #   "href",
  #   "httpstatus",
  #   "alts",
  #   "anchortype",
  #   "rel",
  #   "github.com",
  #   "200",
  #   "markups",
  #   "name",
  #   "text",
  #   "title",
  #   "type",
  #   "start",
  #   "end",
  #   "originalwidth",
  #   "originalheight",
  #   "true",
  #   "false",
  #   "id"
  # ) %>%
  tibble(word = .)

stopwords <-
  bind_rows(stopwords_base, stopwords_custom)

tokens %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE)
tokens %>%
  anti_join(stopwords) %>% 
  count(author, word, sort = TRUE)

# # If `ngram` is a bigram, then...
# tokens_filt <- 
#   tokens %>%
#   separate(ngram, into = c(paste0("word", 1:2)), remove = FALSE) %>% 
#   anti_join(stopwords, by = c("word1" = "word")) %>% 
#   anti_join(stopwords, by = c("word2" = "word"))
# tokens_filt

tokens_filt <- 
  tokens %>%
  anti_join(stopwords)
tokens_filt
theme_custom <- function() { 
  teplot::theme_te(base_size = 12) +
    theme(panel.grid.major.y = element_blank())
}
lab_title_suffix <- "in blog post reviews of rstudio::conf 2019."
lab_caption <- "By Tony ElHabr"

tokens_filt_n <-
  tokens_filt %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE)

viz_top_n <-
  tokens_filt_n %>% 
  top_n(20, n) %>% 
  mutate(word = reorder(word, n)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = word, y = n)) +
  geom_col(fill = "grey50") +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_custom()  +
  labs(
    x = NULL,
    y = "word Count",
    title = sprintf("Most frequently used words\n%s", lab_title_suffix),
    subtitle = "Unsuprisingly, words like `r`, `rstudio`, and `data`\nare most prominent.",
    caption = lab_caption 
  )
viz_top_n

# teproj::export_ext_png(
#   viz_top_n, 
#   # dir = DIR_POST,
#   units = "in",
#   height = 8,
#   width = 4.5
# )
# sentiments_bing <- tidytext::get_sentiments("bing")
sentiments_afinn <- tidytext::get_sentiments("afinn")
# Reference: http://r-statistics.co/Top50-Ggplot2-Visualizations-MasterList-R-Code.html#Lollipop%20Chart
# pal2 <- c("positive" = "#00ba38", "negative" = "#f8766d")

# # If `ngram` is a bigram...
# tokens_filt %>%
#   left_join(sentiments_afinn %>% rename_all(funs(paste0(., "1")))) %>% 
#   left_join(sentiments_afinn %>% rename_all(funs(paste0(., "2")))) %>% 
#   mutate_at(vars(matches("score")), funs(coalesce(., 0L, .))) %>% 
#   mutate(n = score1 + score2) %>% 
#   top_n(20, n) %>% 
#   ggplot(aes(x = ngram, y = n)) + ...

viz_sentiments <-
  tokens_filt %>%
  # inner_join(sentiments_bing) %>% 
  # count(word, sentiment, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  # top_n(20, n) %>% 
  # mutate_at(vars(word), funs(reorder(.,  n))) %>% 
  # ggplot(aes(x = word, y = n, fill = sentiment)) +
  inner_join(sentiments_afinn) %>% 
  group_by(word) %>% 
  summarise(.n = n(), .sum = sum(score)) %>% 
  ungroup() %>% 
  mutate(sentiment = if_else(.sum >= 0, "positive", "negative")) %>% 
  top_n(30, abs(.sum)) %>%
  mutate_at(vars(word), funs(reorder(.,  .sum))) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = word, y = .sum, fill = sentiment)) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("negative" = "grey20", "positive" = "grey70")) +
  geom_col(show.legend = FALSE) +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_custom() +
  labs(
    x = NULL,
    y = "AFINN polarity score",
    title = sprintf("Words contributing most to sentiment\n%s", lab_title_suffix),
    subtitle = "The content is MUCH more positve than negative.",
    caption = lab_caption
  )
viz_sentiments

# teproj::export_ext_png(
#   viz_sentiments, 
#   # dir = DIR_POST,
#   units = "in",
#   height = 8,
#   width = 4.5
# )
# stopwords_custom_topics <-
#   c(
#     "r",
#     "rstudio",
#     "data",
#     "science",
#     "conference",
#     "conf",
#     "talk",
#     "talks",
#     "2019"
#   ) %>%
#   tibble(word = .)
# 
# dtms <-
#   tokens_filt %>% 
#   anti_join(stopwords_custom_topics) %>% 
#   count(author, word) %>% 
#   tidytext::cast_dfm(author, word, n)
# 
# topics <- dtms %>% stm::stm(K = 4, verbose = FALSE, init.type = "Spectral")
# topics
# topics_betas <- topics %>% broom::tidy()
# topics_betas %>% 
#   group_by(topic) %>%
#   top_n(2, beta) %>% 
#   arrange(desc(beta)) %>% 
#   head(30)
# 
# topics_betas_top_n <-
#   topics_betas %>%
#   group_by(topic) %>% 
#   top_n(100, beta)
# topics_betas_top_n %>% 
#   spread(topic, beta) %>% 
#   filter_all(all_vars(!is.na(.)))
# 
# viz_topics <-
#   topics_betas %>%
#   group_by(topic) %>%
#   top_n(10, beta) %>%
#   ungroup() %>%
#   mutate(
#     topic = paste0("Topic ", topic),
#     term = tidytext::reorder_within(term, beta, topic)
#   ) %>%
#   ggplot(aes(term, beta, fill = as.factor(topic))) +
#   geom_col(show.legend = FALSE) +
#   facet_wrap(~ topic, scales = "free_y") +
#   coord_flip() +
#   tidytext::scale_x_reordered() +
#   theme_custom() +
#   theme(axis.text.x = element_blank()) +
#   labs(
#     x = NULL,
#     y = "Beta probability of ngram belonging to topic",
#     title = sprintf("Major \"latent\" topics and associated words discussed\n%s", lab_title_suffix),
#     subtitle = "Although the topics themselves aren't clear, it's clear that\n`shiny`, `production`, `community`, and `packages` were major focal points.",
#     caption = lab_caption
#   )
# viz_topics
# Just to help myself out... DEFINITELY NOT a "best practice".
DIR_VIZ <- file.path(DIR_POST, "index-to-render_files", "figure-markdown_strict")
..file_copy <-
  function(file_from,
           file_to = file_from,
           dir_from = DIR_VIZ,
           dir_to = DIR_POST) {
    invisible(file.copy(
      from = file.path(dir_from, file_from),
      to = file.path(dir_to, file_to),
      overwrite = TRUE
    ))
  }
.file_copy <- function(file_from, ...) {
  ..file_copy(file_from = file_from, ...)
}
.file_copy_rename <-
  function(file_from, file_to = "featured.jpg", dir_from = DIR_POST, ...) {
    ..file_copy(file_from = file_from, file_to = file_to, dir_from = dir_from, ...)
  }
.file_copy("viz_top_n-1.png")
.file_copy("viz_sentiments-1.png")
.file_copy_rename("viz_sentiments-1.png")