Mining GitHub: Inside the R Community
Patrick F. Toohey · SUNY Digital Repository Support (State University of New York System) · 2014
Since its inception in 2008, GitHub has come to house over 1000 R-language projects, including over 180 CRAN packages. In this article we investigate the social structure of the R community on GitHub using the GitHub API; an open web programming interface to GitHub’s repositories and metadata. This generic API includes search facilities which can enumerate repositories associated with specific programming languages. This interface will allow us to investigate the landscape of R development on GitHub and identify key projects with the greatest social impact to the community. Having identified projects of interest, we can use additional facilities of the API to harvest related development activity data, which we can then visualize to better understand the scope of collaboration within the associated repositories.