> input in R. I am hoping to do both the stats and SNA portions of my > analysis in R (using the sna package as well). I endeavor to write a > script to handle everything. My process flow is: mySQL >> R >> R(sna) > >> output tables and graphs >> insert into docs.
This is indeed a sane workflow - pretty much what I use for my own social network analysis work. I happen to use postgresql rather than mysql, but that is somewhat tangential to the problem and occasionally driven by the kind of data I tend to like to work with ;-) Looked at the igraph package? Side-tip -- the sooner one starts writing functions for big blobs of analysis rather than do-it-all scripts, the happier one seems to be. A lot of my old code is not written as functions, and frankly I seem to be putting a lot of work into converting it TO functions prior to being able to reuse it. Oops. > Is .csv the best intermediate format for input into R and the sna > package, or will I have to write my own script to prepare the data in > special R(sna) matrix form? As Byron suggests, pulling the data directly from MySQL into R is probably much simpler, and frankly is pretty straightforward. You'll basically be writing selects that return vectors of data objects - pretty much what you likely already have in SQL, I would guess. There is support for things like Harwell-Boeing sparse matrix format, but you can probably avoid the need for that. The more you can do from within R, the more headaches you can save yourself. R rules :-) > I am analyzing online bulletin board projects, so each project (~1200) > will have a separate set of analyses done on it, then they will be > aggregated and summarized. Nice scale. Did I perhaps see one of your talks in Vancouver (at Sunbelt) a couple years ago? Several people in my department do very similar work (CMC, SNA, computer-mediated discourse analysis, etc, ethnography, etc), and I would love to hear more about what you're doing. Offlist, maybe? --elijah wright School of Library and Information Science Indiana University, Bloomington _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
