Twitter Coverage of the Lorne Genome Conference 2017

Things to know about Lorne in the state of Victoria, Australia.

• It’s situated on the Great Ocean Road, a major visitor attraction and a great way to see the scenic coastline of the region
• It’s home to a number of life science conferences including Lorne Genome 2017

This week’s project then: use R to analyse coverage of the 2017 meeting on Twitter. I last did something similar for the ISMB meeting in 2012. How things have changed. Back then I prepared PDF reports using Sweave, retrieved tweets using the twitteR package and struggled with dates and time when plotting timelines. This time around I wrote RMarkdown in RStudio, tried out the newer rtweet package and, thanks to packages such as dplyr and lubridate, the data munging is all so much cleaner and simpler.

So without further ado here is the Github repository.

The report examines several aspects of the conference coverage under the broad headings of timeline, users, networks, retweets, favourites, quotes, media and text.

On the road: CSS and eResearch Conference 2014

Next week I’ll be in Melbourne for one of my favourite meetings, the annual Computational and Simulation Sciences and eResearch Conference.

The main reason for my visit is the Bioinformatics FOAM workshop. Day 1 (March 27) is not advertised since it is an internal CSIRO day, but I’ll be presenting a talk titled “SQL, noSQL or no database at all? Are databases still a core skill?“. Day 2 (March 28) is open to all and I’ll be talking about “Learning from complete strangers: social networking for bioinformaticians“.

I imagine these and other talks will appear on Slideshare soon, at both my account and that of the Australian Bioinformatics Network.

I’m also excited to see that Victoria Stodden is presenting a keynote at the main CSS meeting (PDF) on “Reproducibility in Computational Science: Opportunities and Challenges”.

Hope to see some of you there.