What's New in R

What’s New in R: October 13, 2026

October 13, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a package that writes alt text for your ggplot2 charts automatically, a package for downloading administrative boundaries for any country, and a gorgeous scrollytelling map of nearly 6,000 castles made with Quarto. Let's dive in!ggalttext The {ggalttext} package by Joseph Barbier automatically generates alternative text for {ggplot2} charts, which is a big help for accessibility since alt text is one of those things...

What’s New in R: October 5, 2026

October 5, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a new approach to building package documentation sites with Quarto, a free guide to building AI agents you can actually trust, and a package that writes your gt tables straight into Excel workbooks. Let's dive in!A new take on documentation sites for R packages Bjarke Hautop Kristensen was frustrated that {pkgdown}, the standard tool for building R package websites, has only limited support for Quarto (callout...

What’s New in R: September 28, 2026

September 28, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a fully open course on quantitative methods that starts with data instead of formulas, an R-Ladies Rome workshop on typesetting with Typst and Quarto, and a package that gives ggplot2 more accessible defaults out of the box. Let's dive in!Quantitative Methods for International Politics Andrew Heiss has posted the full site for his Fall 2026 course on quantitative methods at Georgetown University in Qatar, and like...

What’s New in R: September 21, 2026

September 21, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring the Quarto 1.10 release and its improved accessibility checking, a package for making really interesting maps with simple syntax, and the highlights from Positron's August release. Let's dive in!Quarto 1.10 Charlotte Wickham walks through what's new in Quarto 1.10, which brings a number of smaller fixes along with one thing I really like: easier accessibility checking. The accessibility checker now works offline,...

What’s New in R: September 14, 2026

September 14, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a package that adds tinting and shading aesthetics to your ggplot2 charts, a tool that reviews your code quality in a single report, and the second edition of a beloved book on statistical inference with R. Let's dive in!ggtintshade The {ggtintshade} package by William Kumler extends {ggplot2} so you can map the tint or shade of a color to an aesthetic, in addition to its hue. Why is that useful? It lets you...

What’s New in R: September 8, 2026

September 8, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a book on crafting beautiful slides with Quarto and Reveal.js, a side-by-side reference for translating between data manipulation styles in R and Python, and a new package for making poster-worthy maps of your favorite city. Let's dive in!Slidecrafting ‍Emil Hvitfeldt has written a whole book on slidecrafting: making functional and beautiful Quarto Reveal.js presentations. It goes into great detail across theming...

What’s New in R: August 31, 2026

August 31, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring an Australian government report on AI and employment made entirely in R, a data-driven look at how much hotter Spain has gotten, and a primer on agent skills from R/Pharma. Let's dive in!AI and employment in Australia Matt Cowgill shared on Bluesky that this report from the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations was made entirely in R: every word, table, and chart. The report, written by the...

What’s New in R: August 24, 2026

August 24, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a new package for making chord diagrams the ggplot2 way, a gloriously unnecessary package that lets you play Doom in R, and a clever tool for searching the R ecosystem by what functions do rather than what packages are called. Let's dive in!Chord diagrams in R with ggchord2 Nicola Rennie introduces {ggchord2}, a new {ggplot2} extension for drawing chord diagrams, which are a unique way to visualize the flows and...

What’s New in R: August 17, 2026

August 17, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a rundown of your options for collaborating on Quarto documents, a tool that lets non-technical collaborators edit those documents in a Word-like interface, and some thoughtful reflections on the state of geocomputation with R. Let's dive in!Collaborating on Quarto documents Nicola Rennie tackles a problem a lot of us run into: how do you collaborate on a Quarto document with people who don't write code? She lays...