I’ve been scraping the interwebs for tools that show off how R can be awesome. Part of that awesomeness stems from a vibrant community that, out of sheer joy, builds tools for you, for free. If you know of any other tools that you think might be generally useful, post in the comments.

First: Maybe you’re interested in analyzing a corpus of text, or regional distribution of personality. The Data Science Toolkit is here for you. There is an astounding wealth of tools for taking bunches of data, that are often just laying around, and doing something useful with them. Seriously, click on the link and check it out. Crucially, there’s an R package for accessing these tools.

Second, in the spirit of open science, and communicating to a broad audience, I’d like to introduce you to RStudio – Shiny . Shiny makes it easy to write user-friendly web applications you can wrap your data in. If you think scatter-plots are a step toward data transparency, this is a giant leap. Let the curious reader use drop-downs, radio buttons, and sliders to page through the patterns in your data. This project is still in it’s early stages so you’ll either need to be running your own linux web server (aren’t we all?) or you can register for a free beta trial of their server. In the future, I hope that universities might begin to support such tools for us to supplement our publications.