Today I presented Read.isi, the R-Project package I developed, to the useR! 2008 conference in Dortmund. I already wrote being amazed by the large number of people coming to this conference, and many of them showed up at my presentation. The room I presented was remarkably larger than where the social sciences session was held. Anyone considering a career change?
The presentation went well. I received some very nice suggestions on improving the package from people who are real programmers. Indeed, it probably will increase the speed of the package. Also, Duncan Murdoch, the chair of the session, suggested that the package should be referred to from the R-Project web-site!
More information on this package can be found below, or on the Read.isi page on this site, which will continuously be updated when development on this package continues.
Read.isi
Read.isi is an R-Project extension package that allows users to gain automated access to data from the World Fertility Survey (WFS) program. Presently, no software for advanced statistical analyses is capable of doing so.
Due to technological progress and software development, it sometimes is no longer possible to automatically read older data-files into statistical software, for they are often distributed as raw (ASCII) data without proper means to read those data into statistical packages. However, especially for those interested in using data to perform longitudinal analyses, these older sets of data are very valuable. This situation was encountered regarding the World Fertility Survey (WFS), a three decennia old, internationally comparative survey program on fertility issues.
It is available from within the R-Project software, and downloadable from CRAN.
Presentation at useR! 2008
The Read.isi package has been presented at the useR! 2008 conference in Dortmund, Germany. Please feel free to download one or more of the following files: