R Weekly Highlights

It's not every day that we get to dive into a brand new release of R, but we get to do just that in episode 202! We share our takes on the major new features of R 4.5.0. We also preview the re-imagination of the engine powering R-based APIs, and the LLM-powered helper to get some of those R package development chores done. Episode Links This week's…

In this episode of R Weekly Highlights: We have a six-month follow-up perspective from an early Positron user, how the current landscape of AI tools perform when learning the ropes with the Tidyverse, and how you can create your first Observable plot while using R for data munging. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Carroll -…

By some minor miracle (even on April Fools) the R Weekly Highlights podcast has made it to episode 200! We go "virtual" shopping for LLM-powered text analysis and prediction using the mall package, and how recent advancements in the grid and ggplot2 packages empower you to make use of highly-customized gradients. Plus listener feedback! Episode…

Thriving in a multi-lingual data science lifestyle while authoring your next Quarto project, putting LLMs to the scientific test with parsing manuscripts, and replicating a life-saving spatial visualization originally created over 170 years ago! Episode Links This week's curator: Ryo Nakagawara - @[email protected] (Mastodon) &…

Giving your package documentation site a little personality and much more with {pkgdown} customization, plus a novel new package to bring the power of LaTeX to all of your plots! Episode Links This week's curator: Batool Almarzouq - @batoolmm.bsky.social (Bluesky) & @batool664 (X/Twitter) Customize your expedition: Create a unique documentation…

A major milestone for leveraging LLMs in R just landed with the new ellmer package, along with a terrific showcase of retrieval-augmented generation combining ellmer and DuckDB. Plus an inspiring roundup of the recent Closeread contest winners. Episode Links This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @parmsam_…

Our candid takes on the state of CRAN's role in light of recent package archival events, how creative use of LLMs could greatly streamline your next literature review, and a few great illustrations of lazy being a good thing in your R session. Episode Links This week's curator: Eric Nantz - @[email protected] (Mastodon) &…

An illuminating set of tips for making the best out of the phrase "fifty shades of grey" in your next monochrome visualisation, how the unique formatting features of the Scotland census data were tamed with the power of R, and how the first-ever native mobile application powered by R has opened the doors wide open for innovation across many parts…

Context is king in a trifecta of R packages harnessing LLMs to be your virtual assistant in package development and data science, plus the world (of data) is at your fingertips for data exploration and sharing your insights using the innovative closeread Quarto extension. Episode Links This week's curator: Jonathan Kitt -…

Ready to bring your next presentation slides to the world of Quarto? Our first highlight has a batch of power tips you can use for your next slide deck. Plus terrific insights from first-time contributors to open-source software. Episode Links This week's curator: Jon Calder - @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @jonmcalder (X/Twitter) Seven…