Continuing our streak of R-based meetings, this month we learned about scraping the web in R.
Our guest speaker was Steve Pittard, a lecturer in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory, among other things. Steve helpfully shared a manuscript he's put together in Bookdown that walks us through the lessons he's developed:
https://steviep42.github.io/webscraping/book/
Several group members commented on how the same sort of analyses he applied to posts scraped from dialysis patient forums could be translated to other fields. Its not always clear how well the views presented in clinical literature align with sentiments expressed by patients.
Thanks, Steve, you gave us plenty of food for thought!