Examples repository: Python and R

For users who have been using Harmony in their research, we have created an example scripts repository here

https://github.com/harmonydata/harmony_examples

This contains example R notebooks and Jupyter notebooks. You can upload your own example script if you have something to share with the research community.

Example problems that users have been solving included:

R examples

Walkthrough R notebook in R Studio:
Walkthrough R notebook in Google Colab:
R Markdown to Check for Correspondence between Differently Worded Versions of the Same Scale Item View on Github - credit to Deanna Varley
R Script to Check for Matches between Items from Different Scales View on Github - credit to Deanna Varley

Python examples

Documentation

View the PDF documentation of the R package on CRAN

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

Since we built Harmony, a common complaint has been that it frequently identifies the wrong questions in PDFs. The original algorithm for finding questions in PDFs was a mixture of rule based heuristics and some hand coded logic to look for e.g. lines in the document which begin with numbers. This was very fragile and worked fine on short questionnaires such as the GAD-7, but failed on larger documents. We decided to run a competition with our partner DOXA AI where members of the public could train their own model to extract questions from PDFs.

Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop On 2 May 2025, Dr Eoin McElroy demonstrated Harmony at the MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop in Deutsche Bank. Eoin’s presentation focused on “Maximising the use of existing survey data: facilitating cross-study research using retrospective harmonization.” The workshop brought together researchers interested in applying novel harmonisation techniques to existing datasets. Eoin explained traditional harmonisation processes and presented a user-friendly guide to the Harmony tool, demonstrating how natural language processing can streamline the harmonisation process.