Submission: remoodji (R)

Scope

Please indicate which category or categories from our package fit policies this package falls under: (Please check an appropriate box below. If you are unsure, we suggest you make a pre-submission inquiry.):

[ ] data retrieval
[x] data extraction
[x] data munging
[ ] data deposition
[ ] workflow automation
[ ] version control
[ ] citation management and bibliometrics
[ ] scientific software wrappers
[ ] field and lab reproducibility tools
[ ] database software bindings
[ ] geospatial data
[x] text analysis

Explain how and why the package falls under these categories (briefly, 1-2 sentences):

Remoodji is a text analysis package which works to wrangle text input data and determine the text's sentiments and overall emotions. The package entails functions to output this sentiment analysis through dataframes, plot visuals, and emoji text replacement

Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

This package is targeted to people who are interested in analyzing specific writing pieces, such as speeches, letters, and songs. There are no specific scientific applications of remoodji, except for some psychological analysis on human emotion through language.

Are there other R packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ or meet our criteria for best-in-category?

Yes, tidytext. However, remoodji summarizes the sentiment analysis for easier interpretation for non-technical audiences.

(If applicable) Does your package comply with our guidance around Ethics, Data Privacy and Human Subjects Research?

If you made a pre-submission enquiry, please paste the link to the corresponding issue, forum post, or other discussion, or @tag the editor you contacted.

Technical checks

Confirm each of the following by checking the box.

This package:

[x] does not violate the Terms of Service of any service it interacts with.

[x] has a CRAN and OSI accepted license.

[x] contains a README with instructions for installing the development version.

[x] includes documentation with examples for all functions, created with roxygen2.

[x] contains a vignette with examples of its essential functions and uses.

[x] has a test suite.

[x] has continuous integration, including reporting of test coverage using services such as Travis CI, Coveralls and/or CodeCov.

Publication options

[ ] Do you intend for this package to go on CRAN?

[ ] Do you intend for this package to go on Bioconductor?

[ ] Do you wish to submit an Applications Article about your package to Methods in Ecology and Evolution? If so:

MEE Options

- [ ] The package is novel and will be of interest to the broad readership of the journal. - [ ] The manuscript describing the package is no longer than 3000 words. - [ ] You intend to archive the code for the package in a long-term repository which meets the requirements of the journal (see [MEE's Policy on Publishing Code](http://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2041-210X/journal-resources/policy-on-publishing-code.html)) - (*Scope: Do consider MEE's [Aims and Scope](http://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2041-210X/aims-and-scope/read-full-aims-and-scope.html) for your manuscript. We make no guarantee that your manuscript will be within MEE scope.*) - (*Although not required, we strongly recommend having a full manuscript prepared when you submit here.*) - (*Please do not submit your package separately to Methods in Ecology and Evolution*)

This is a super neat package, I love it!

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work.

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s) demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

For packages co-submitting to JOSS

[ ] The package has an obvious research application according to JOSS's definition

The package contains a paper.md matching JOSS's requirements with:

[ ] A short summary describing the high-level functionality of the software

[ ] Authors: A list of authors with their affiliations

[ ] A statement of need clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience.

[ ] References: with DOIs for all those that have one (e.g. papers, datasets, software).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 2

[ ] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Installation

devtools::load_all() resulted in

Error: Dependency package(s) 'tidytext','textdata','emojifont' not available.

This only required a relatively simple fix by manually installing these packages. This issue may be partially addressed by adding these dependencies under Depends section of DESCRIPTION.

Function Documentation

Codes for the functions are written in a very readable manner using tidyverse-style.

All examples were reproducible and ran smoothly locally. It may help to include function call examples in the roxygen documentation as well (This was already done for counter function).

Most external function calls were made using explicit NAMESPACE::FUNCTION calls, but there were a few examples where this was not explicit (e.g. geom_bar, ggtitle).

Contribution Guidelines

Very detailed and clearly-written contribution guidelines in the CONTRIBUTING file

Functionality / Performance / Automated Tests

Has the functionalities as described in the vignettes, passes all tests.

Can increase the test coverage:

for textsentiment_to_emoji when no argument is passed (or NULL is passed) for the optional sentiment_dataframe argument
for textsentiment_to_emoji by including a test for a word associated with each emoji to cover each of the else if cases
for sentiment_plot by including tests that check the title, legend location, angle of x-axis labels, etc.

General Comments

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and my understanding of software licenses may be flawed

While it's great to see that this package is licensed under the MIT License, there may be license compatibility issues because some of the package dependencies are not as permissive as MIT license. As an example, base R and tidyverse are licensed under GPL-3. While GPL-3 and MIT licenses are compatible, the resulting work should be distributed under GPL-3.

I'm super excited you got this to work fairly well. Good work Team remoodji!

UBC-MDS / software-review-2021