The observation that “La Quinta is Spanish for ‘next to Denny’s’” is a joke made famous by the late comedian Mitch Hedberg. John Reiser, on his new jersey geographer blog, wrote up an analysis of this joke using data scraped from the respective websites of Denny’s (a diner chain) and La Quinta Inns and Suites (a hotel chain). In this case study we use Reiser’s work as inspiration for conducting a similar analysis in R, using a variety of packages for web scraping and processing non-tidy data into tidy data frames to be used in geospatial analysis.
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University and Developer Educator at Posit. Mine’s work focuses on innovation in statistics and data science pedagogy, with an emphasis on computing, reproducible research, student-centered learning, and open-source education. She is a co-author of R for Data Science, Introduction to Modern Statistics, and OpenIntro Statistics. She is also the creator and maintainer of datasciencebox.org and she teaches the popular Data Analysis with R and Data Science with R specializations on Coursera.
