Shiny is an R-based programming solution that allows building interactive web apps and combines the computational power of R with the interactivity of the modern web. It allows to host standalone apps on a webpage, embed them in R Markdown documents, or build dashboards.
This section acts as a showroom of apps I’ve put together for conferences or simply as a presentation of my work.
SEEth Sense
The app is a wrapper for a machine-learning model trained for text classification used in the paper Ethnic Bias after Ethnic Conflict: Preferential Voting and the Serb Minority in Croatian Elections (link). Set up as a binary classification problem, the model replicates the sixth sense people from the SEE region have when hearing a name and saying “that’s a Croatian name/that’s a Serbian name” (hence the name SEEth Sense). The model is trained using a balanced dataset of 225 110 Croat/Serbian names and achieves an accuracy of over 91%. Test the app here.
Academic ScrapeR
Although there are several alternatives for doing systematic literature reviews for academics, none of them are focused on field-specific applications. Moreover, existing databases usually do not cover all relevant journals or their most recent publications including early view versions of accepted papers. The app is inspired by a routine I applied while working on literature reviews when I systematically checked my field-specific journals using complex Boolean expressions.
The engine uses RSelenium web driver for navigating rvest web scraper to papers returned by a search query executed on a journal’s native homepage. A typical result is a database containing meta information on scraped papers that can be easily checked and further processed (qualitatively or quantitatively). Due to copyright reasons and restrictions concerning web scraping, the app is not freely available and can be run only locally. Below is a video showing how the app works in practice. Currently, the database contains over 50 field-relevant journals published by various publishing houses.
