Degrees of Separation Between CRAN authors • kevinbacran

This package comes with no guarantees whatsoever.

What?

How separated (in a graph-theory sense) are authors on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), the home of R packages?

The aim is to provide some functions to approximate an implementation of The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, or Erdos Numbers and variants.

{kevinbacran} demo: what’s your Hadley Number? by Matt Dray: a shiny app to get and visualise the separation between CRAN authors and Hadley Wickham.
‘What’s your Hadley Number?’ by Matt Dray: a blogpost introducing the package and the Shiny app
‘With added bacran’ by Duncan Garmonsway: a blogpost using the package to find out more about author separation on CRAN:

How do?

# Install this development version with
remotes::install_github("matt-dray/kevinbacran")

# Load the package
library(kevinbacran)

# Get a tidygraph of authors from CRAN data 
# (nodes) and packages (edges)
combo_graph <- kb_combos()

# Get subset of CRAN tidygraph composed of named authors
# plus the packages and authors that connect them
pair_graph <- kb_pair(
  tidy_graph = combo_graph,
  name_a = "Aaron Christ",
  name_b = "Hadley Wickham"
)

# Print distance value between named authors
kb_distance(pair_graph = pair_graph)

# Plot network graph of authors and packages
# Named authors are terminals
kb_plot(pair_graph = pair_graph)

Note that the functions of {kevinbacran} are prefixed with kb_*.

A snapshot of the CRAN graph from late Feb 2019 is available from the package by calling cran_graph. This may be useful for testing purposes.

References

This package makes use of several other excellent packages.

{cranly}

Ioannis Kosmidis (2019). cranly: Package Directives and Collaboration Networks in CRAN. R package version 0.3. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=cranly

{dplyr}

Hadley Wickham, Romain François, Lionel Henry and Kirill Müller (2019). dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation. R package version 0.8.0.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr

{ggplot2}

H. Wickham. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York, 2016.

{ggraph}

Thomas Lin Pedersen (2018). ggraph: An Implementation of Grammar of Graphics for Graphs and Networks. R package version 1.0.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggraph

{purrr}

Lionel Henry and Hadley Wickham (2019). purrr: Functional Programming Tools. R package version 0.3.0. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=purrr

{tidygraph}

Thomas Lin Pedersen (2019). tidygraph: A Tidy API for Graph Manipulation. R package version 1.1.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidygraph

{tidyr}

Hadley Wickham and Lionel Henry (2018). tidyr: Easily Tidy Data with ‘spread()’ and ‘gather()’ Functions. R package version 0.8.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidyr

kevinbacran: Degrees of Separation Between CRAN Authors