pubdate_Date: Convert JSTOR pubdate strings to Date objects

In agoldst/dfrtopics: Tools for exploring topic models of text

Convert JSTOR pubdate strings to Date objects

Description

This function converts JSTOR publication-date metadata into Date objects, which are more suitable to arithmetic and visualization. The lubridate package is extremely useful for handling these. read_dfr_citations uses this function in reading JSTOR metadata, so you should only use this yourself if you are loading metadata another way.

Usage

pubdate_Date(pubdate)

Arguments

pubdate

a character vector of JSTOR pubdates

Details

JSTOR represents publication dates, with considerable false precision, as ISO 8601 date-time strings, e.g. 1912-10-01T00:00:00Z. In my experience all such dates are given with a time of midnight UTC. This function ignores the time specification and keeps only the date (otherwise, we have to worry about surprises in different time zones). Even this has only a remote relation to actual publication dates (volumes with no day or month of publication are assigned to the 1st and to January; and in any case periodical publication dates often have a complex relationship to the realities of foot-dragging contributors, dilatory printers, etc.

Value

a vector of Dates

agoldst/dfrtopics documentation built on July 15, 2022, 4:13 p.m.