On Wednesday, May 30th, UWSC’s Dr. Nathan Jones will be giving a talk as part of the Center for Demography and Ecology’s Computational Demography summer seminar.
Building Contextual Data from Online Sources
Social scientists have rapidly increasing opportunities to collect contextual data using online repositories to supplement their research. Obtaining, managing, and using these new sources to their full potential can be daunting, but tools are under heavy development to make these tasks easier. Nathan will use the statistical computing software R and several helper tools to collect contextual data using websites’ application programming interface (API), combine the new data with an example dataset, and create helpful tables and maps with the new sources. For attendees who would like to play along, please bring a laptop with up to date versions of R and RStudio with the following packages installed: httr, jsonlite, ggmap, and tidyverse. It is also helpful to create a Google API key and a Github account. Nathan will provide a Github repo link at the presentation.