Itrax Data Manipulation in R

I’ve been working on ways to make Itrax data more useful to casual users – I figured one way to do this would be to provide some kind of standard report for each scan (or core sequence), with a stratigraphic diagram, some zonation and multivariate analysis. I’ve decided to do this in R, as it is freely available, cross-platform, handles large datasets and has some existing packages that are useful in manipulating scanning XRF data. At present the functionality is very basic (a bit like my understanding of R). I’ve made the following functions available on my Github repository:

  • Import: A function for importing Itrax data into R and cleaning it up a bit on the way. Can also plot the data.
  • Ordination: Performs correspondence analysis, with various options for preparing the data. Also provides biplots.
  • Correlation: Generates correlation matrixes for Itrax data, and some visualisation.
  • Average: Averages Itrax data into a smaller dataset.

I’ll update as I add or modify functionality and documentation. I’m particularly interested to hear from others who are writing code for working with Itrax data, as I think it would make sense to collaborate and work towards a single, powerful suite of tools. Currently my plan is to begin to incorporate some of Menno Bloemsma’s methodology (parts of Itraxelerate) into R, whilst also working on a printable “standard” core data report that can be generated in batches from raw data.