Sharon Machlis

Executive Editor, Data & Analytics

Sharon Machlis is Director of Editorial Data & Analytics at Foundry (the IDG, Inc. company that publishes websites including Computerworld and InfoWorld), where she analyzes data, codes in-house tools, and writes about data analysis tools and tips. She holds an Extra class amateur radio license and is somewhat obsessed with R. Her book Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism was published by CRC Press.

Sharon was named Digital Analytics Association's 2021 Top (Data) Practitioner, winner of the 2023 Jesse H. Neal journalism award for best instructional content, 2014 Azbee national gold award for investigative reporting, and 2017 Azbee gold for how-to article, among other awards.

Top R language resources to improve your data skills

Top R language resources to improve your data skills

From books to videos to online tutorials -- most free! -- here are plenty of ideas to burnish your R knowledge.

These R packages import sports, weather, stock data and more

These R packages import sports, weather, stock data and more

Want to look at salary trends? Check a stock's price history? Look at the performance of your favorite sports team? Here's how to easily pull publicly available data into R.

RStudio cloud service in the works?

RStudio cloud service in the works?

An official RStudio cloud service appears to be under development

Create maps in R in 10 (fairly) easy steps

Use the R programming language to turn location-based data into interactive maps

Bonus downloads: How to make color-coded thematic maps in R

These files will help you follow our R language tutorial, "How to create maps with R in 10 (fairly) easy steps."

Beginner's guide to R: Painless data visualization

From no-frills graphics to adding color and labeling your data, here's what you need to know.

Beginner's guide to R: Easy ways to do basic data analysis

From getting subsets of your data to pulling basic stats from your data frame, here's what you need to know.

Beginner's guide to R: Introduction

In part 1 of our hands-on series, we explain why R's a great choice for basic data analysis and visualization work, and how to get started.

Beginner's guide to R: Get your data into R

Whether it's local or from the Web, there are several ways to get data into R for further work.

R Consortium survey seeks input from R users

R Consortium survey seeks input from R users

Have opinions about R? The Consortium wants to hear from you.

22 free tools for data visualization and analysis

22 free tools for data visualization and analysis

Make your data sing. We look at 22 free tools that will help you use visualization and analysis to turn your data into informative, engaging graphics.

U.S. law allows low H-1B wages; just look at Apple

U.S. law allows low H-1B wages; just look at Apple

Apple's a great example of how the H-1B system can work, and where the visa goes wrong.

Power BI to add Premium service; private dashboard is free no more

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a Premium enterprise service for its Power BI data visualization platform.

RStudio makes another high-profile hire

RStudio makes another high-profile hire

After Jenny Bryan and Max Kuhn joined the company last fall, Hadley Wickham told me he didn't plan to add to his team "in the near future." It looks like the near future has passed.

10 fun tech ads through the years

80 Mbytes of storage for less than $12,000! boasts one ad. In another, a woman in hot pants touts a modem that's "maybe even sexy." These were too much fun not to share.

Quick hands-on: Tableau adds shapefile, KML & GeoJSON imports for custom maps

You can now use your own geospatial files to create custom choropleth maps in Tableau.

Esri to kick off GIS DevSummit with live stream, new resources

The conference is aimed at developers who want to do robust geographical analysis and add geospatial capabilities to their apps.

Mapping in R just got a whole lot easier

Mapping in R just got a whole lot easier

Thanks to the R simple features project and packages like tmaps that support it, choropleth maps are now a breeze to create with R. I'll walk you through mapping median U.S. wages for IT managers. And don't miss the last step: A tiny...

Facebook releases 'Prophet' -- its free forecasting tools -- for Python and R

Prophet is aimed specifically at business problems such as computer infrastructure capacity planning.

Create your own Slack bots -- and web APIs -- in R

Create your own Slack bots -- and web APIs -- in R

Make your own API and connect it to a Slack custom slash command -- all in R. This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to find a current stock price, but the basic framework can be used for all sorts of data.

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