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Teaching


Hertie School of Governance (Fall 2014/15)

MPP-E1180: Introduction to Collaborative Social Science Data Analysis



Yonsei Courses (Spring 2013)

INT4021: The Global Monetary & Financial System

EIC3120: International Political Economy

INT3040: Understanding Global Affairs



Yonsei Courses (Fall 2012)

INT3042: Introduction to Social Science Data Analysis

INT3041: War, Peacebuilding, and Reconstruction





Other Teaching Materials

Lyx and JabRef for LaTeX/BibTeX Short Course

Coursepack for a introductory class in Lyx and JabRef. It covers a number of regularly used tasks including making an article, handling float figures and tables, integrating a bibliography, and making basic Beamer presentations. Please contact me for the activity files.
  • Note: the Coursepack is currently for Lyx 1.6, rather than the more recently released version 2.0. However, apart from a few of the button symbols, most of the material still applies.

Small How-To Presentations:

Google Motion Charts and R

This short presentation explains how to create use R to create Google Motion Charts with World Bank Data (includes example code).


Scraping Text from Multiple Websites with R

A how-to that explains the basics of using xpath in R with loops to scrape text from multiple websites. It also includes some basic de-bugging.

Popular posts from this blog

Dropbox & R Data

I'm always looking for ways to download data from the internet into R. Though I prefer to host and access plain-text data sets (CSV is my personal favourite) from GitHub (see my short paper on the topic) sometimes it's convenient to get data stored on Dropbox . There has been a change in the way Dropbox URLs work and I just added some functionality to the repmis R package. So I though that I'ld write a quick post on how to directly download data from Dropbox into R. The download method is different depending on whether or not your plain-text data is in a Dropbox Public folder or not. Dropbox Public Folder Dropbox is trying to do away with its public folders. New users need to actively create a Public folder. Regardless, sometimes you may want to download data from one. It used to be that files in Public folders were accessible through non-secure (http) URLs. It's easy to download these into R, just use the read.table command, where the URL is the file name

Slide: one function for lag/lead variables in data frames, including time-series cross-sectional data

I often want to quickly create a lag or lead variable in an R data frame. Sometimes I also want to create the lag or lead variable for different groups in a data frame, for example, if I want to lag GDP for each country in a data frame. I've found the various R methods for doing this hard to remember and usually need to look at old blog posts . Any time we find ourselves using the same series of codes over and over, it's probably time to put them into a function. So, I added a new command– slide –to the DataCombine R package (v0.1.5). Building on the shift function TszKin Julian posted on his blog , slide allows you to slide a variable up by any time unit to create a lead or down to create a lag. It returns the lag/lead variable to a new column in your data frame. It works with both data that has one observed unit and with time-series cross-sectional data. Note: your data needs to be in ascending time order with equally spaced time increments. For example 1995, 1996

A Link Between topicmodels LDA and LDAvis

Carson Sievert and Kenny Shirley have put together the really nice LDAvis R package. It provides a Shiny-based interactive interface for exploring the output from Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models. If you've never used it, I highly recommend checking out their XKCD example (this paper also has some nice background). LDAvis doesn't fit topic models, it just visualises the output. As such it is agnostic about what package you use to fit your LDA topic model. They have a useful example of how to use output from the lda package. I wanted to use LDAvis with output from the topicmodels package. It works really nicely with texts preprocessed using the tm package. The trick is extracting the information LDAvis requires from the model and placing it into a specifically structured JSON formatted object. To make the conversion from topicmodels output to LDAvis JSON input easier, I created a linking function called topicmodels_json_ldavis . The full function is below. To