One of the things I tend to avoid doing in R, partly because there are better tools elsewhere, is screenscraping. With the release of the new rvest package, I thought I’d have a go at what amounts to one of the simplest webscraping activites – grabbing HTML tables out of ...

[This isn’t an R post, per se, but I’m syndicating it via RBloggers because I’m interested – how do you work with hierarchical column indices in R? Do you try to reshape the data to something tidier on the way in? Can you autodetect elements to help with ...

A couple of handy tricks when working with ggplot that had escaped my radar until today. First up, I had a problem in a function I was using to generate a ggplot2 in which I wanted to accept a couple of optional arguments in to the function and then make ...

One of the things I’ve been trying to explore with my #f1datajunkie projects are ways of representing information that work both in a glanceable way as well as repaying deeper reading. I’ve also been looking at various ways of using text labels rather than markers to provide ...

As part of the Wrangling F1 Data With R project, I want to be able to generate sentences iteratively from a templated base. The following recipe works for sentences included in an external file: What I’d really like to be able to do is put the Rmd template into ...

I’ve started scraping some FIA timing sheets again, including practice and qualifying session laptimes. One of the things I’d like to do is explore various ways of looking at the qualifying session laptimes, which means identifying which qualifying session each laptime falls into: For looking at session utilisation ...

Trying to clear my head of code on a dog walk after a couple of days tinkering with the nomis API and I started to ponder what an API is good for. Chris Gutteridge and Alex Duttion’s open data excuses bingo card and Owen Boswarva’s Open Data Publishing ...

Despite believing we can treat anything we can represent in digital form as “data”, I’m still pretty flakey on understanding what sorts of analysis we can easily do with different sorts of data. Time series analysis is one area – the pandas Python library has all manner of handy tools ...

Increasingly I find that I have fallen into using not-really-R whilst playing around with Formula One stats data. Instead, I seem to be using a hybrid of SQL to get data out of a small SQLite3 datbase and into an R dataframe, and then ggplot2 to render visualise it. So ...

It’s been some time now since I drafted most of my early unit contributions to the TM351 Data management and analysis course. Part of the point (for me) in drafting that material was to find out what sorts of thing we actually wanted to say and help identify the ...

A couple of days ago, I posted a recipe on the F1DataJunkie blog that described how to calculate track position from laptime data. Using that information, as well as additional derived columns such as the identity of, and time to, the cars immediately ahead of and behind a particular ...

building on Dockerising Open Data Databases – First Fumblings and my Book Extras – Data Files, Code Files and a Dockerised Application, I just figured out how to get the ergast db into a MySQL docker container and then query it from RStudio: Download and unzip the f1db.sql.gz file ...

Idling through the LeanPub documentation last night, I noticed that they support the ability to sell digital extras, such as bundled code files or datafiles. Along with the base book sold at one price, additional extras can be bundled into packages alongside the original book and sold at another (higher) ...

In the last quarter of last year, I started paying more attention to the use of custom grid lines and line guides in charts I’ve been developing for the Wrangling F1 Data With R book. The use of line guides was in part inspired by canopy views from within ...

Looking just now for an openly licensed graphic showing a set of scatterplots that demonstrate different correlations between X and Y values, I couldn’t find one. So here’s a quick R script for constructing one, based on a Cross Validated question/answer (Generate two variables with precise pre-specified ...

The title says it all, doesn’t it?! Take the following example – it happens to show race positions by driver for each lap of a particular F1 grand prix, but it could be the evolution over time of any rank-based population. The question I had in mind was – how can ...

I’ve been doodling today with a some charts for the Wrangling F1 Data With R living book, trying to see how much information I can start trying to pack into a single chart. The initial impetus came simply from thinking about a count of laps led in a particular ...

As we come up to the final two races of the 2014 Formula One season, the double points mechanism for the final race means that two drivers are still in with a shot at the Drivers’ Championship: Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. As James Allen describes in Hamilton closes in on ...