This update introduces rather big changes, but we have tried to make
it as painless as possible. No functionalities are lost, but some
function names have changed, and the old versions will be removed in the
next update.
We are working towards dropping support for the tm package style
DTMs. RNewsflow started out using the tm package for managing the DTM,
but at present the quanteda package is much more suitable. The current
version still supports tm, but all functions that use it have been
marked as deprecated, and will be removed in the future.
This major change was a nice opportunity to do some refactoring. The
now deprecated functions used a style in which function and argument
names used dots to separate words. The new functions instead use
underscores.
The newsflow_compare function (or newsflow.compare) is now just a
thin wrapper for the more versatile compare_documents function.
The document comparison functions (and the tcrossprod_sparse
backend) now also return margin attributes, such has the number of
documents each document has been compared to, and the sum weight.
Essentially this is the row/column information that is normally
available in an adjacency matrix, but with the special filtering
features for comparing documents over time, within groups or using
thresholds, this information is lost. (We’re currently using this
information to experiment with some similarity threshold estimation
functions with promising results, so this will probably be added in a
next update).