https://www.rostrum.blog/tags/text/ Recent content in Text on rostrum.blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2021/09/12/extract-punct/ Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2021/09/12/extract-punct/ The start of ‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Melville tl;dr I wrote an R function to extract only the punctuation marks from a provided text. It prints prettily to the console, but you can also take a character vector away for further analysis. Punct rock A few years ago Adam J Calhoun did a small but really neat thing: extracted and presented only the punctuation from some books. It appeared again recently in my Twitter timeline. https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/04/30/markov-chain-phd-2/ Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/04/30/markov-chain-phd-2/ This is science, I promise. tl;dr A Markov chain perfectly summarises my entire PhD thesis: In general, litter chemical composition and decomposition. {markovifyR} I posted a while back about using a Markov chain to generate sentences using my PhD thesis as input. I also posted about the {markovifyR} package for generating lyrics by The Mountain Goats. This is a quick update to that original post, but this time I’m using {markovifyR}. https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/04/25/gen-tmg-lyrics/ Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/04/25/gen-tmg-lyrics/ John Darnielle with the green-scaled slipcase for In League with Dragons (Merge Records, via Giphy) The Mountain Goats released In League with Dragons today, their seventeenth studio album. John Darnielle has written a lot of words across the Mountain Goat’s back catalogue. His lyrics are poetic and descriptive, covering fictional and autobiographical themes that include substance abuse, professional wrestling and cadaver-sniffing dogs. Can we generate new Mountain Goats lyrics given this rich text data set? https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/06/30/markov-chain-phd/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/06/30/markov-chain-phd/ This. Is. Science. tl;dr I wrote a thesis, but a Markov chain can rewrite it and make about as much sense as the original. See also an updated version of this blog for a better approach. Doc rot I wrote a PhD thesis in 2014 called ‘Effects of multiple environmental stressors on litter chemical composition and decomposition’. See my viva presentation slides here if you don’t really like words. https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/05/25/cloud-pie/ Fri, 25 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/05/25/cloud-pie/ The pinnacle of visualisation Great news everyone: I’ve taken the best of two stellar data visualisations and smashed them together into something that can only be described as perfection. Let me set the scene. There’s three things we can agree on: Everyone loves pie charts, particularly when they’re in 3D, exploded and tilted. Word clouds aren’t at all overused. I have too much time on my hands. With that in mind, I’ve artfully melded clouds and pies into the function cloud_pie(), which I think sounds rather sweet. https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/04/14/r-trek-exploring-stardates/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/04/14/r-trek-exploring-stardates/ Captain’s log Star date 71750.51. Our mission is to use R statistical software to extract star dates mentioned in the captain’s log from the scripts of Star Trek: The Next Generation and observe their progression over the course of the show’s seven seasons. There appears to be some mismatch in the frequency of digits after the decimal point – could this indicate poor ability to choose random numbers?