What's New in R
A weekly roundup of new resources in the world of R.
What’s New in R: June 24, 2024
June 24, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring an opinionated view on the purpose of Quarto documents, an announcement of a new book, and an interview highlighting the role of R in preserving river health. Let’s dive in!Don’t use Quarto documents to clean or analyze data The title of this article is definitely provocative! In the article, Diego Catalán Molina argues that using Quarto documents for exploratory data analysis is a bad idea. Even if you don’t...
What’s New in R: June 17, 2024
June 17, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring an article on the value of using R, a tutorial on writing your own functions, and a blog post showing how to get R to send texts on your behalf. Let’s dive in!How (and Why) I came to Use R for Data Analysis and Evaluation This article, written by Alberto Espinoza, talks about the value of using R in the context of evaluation. But it’s a useful read, even if you work in a very different industry. Alberto talks...
What’s New in R: June 10, 2024
June 10, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring an analysis of households with many cars, advice on naming files, and a package to make flow charts. Let’s dive in!Where are the 4+-car households? In my years of teaching R, I’ve found that one of the most useful ways to help people learn R is to read tutorials that go from start to finish on an analysis. This blog post by Harald Kliems does just that, demonstrating how you could get and analyze data from the...
What's New in R: June 3, 2024
June 3, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring an introductory workshop on R, a tutorial on customizing ggplot legends, and a walkthrough to help you get a Quarto-based website set up and hosted online. Let’s dive in!Introduction to R and RStudio Part 1 The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has many R users. The NHS-R Community recently hosted an online intro to R workshop, which they’ve posted online. This looks like a great resource for those just starting...
What's New in R: May 28, 2024
May 28, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring two tutorials on manipulating images with the {magick} package and a package that helps you make better line charts. Let’s dive in!Convert iPhone Photos to PNG in 12 Lines of R Code! File this under things you might never have considered using R for but are actually quite useful: In this YouTube video, Lee Durbin shows how to use R to convert photos from the iPhone-specific .HEIC format to the more common .PNG...
What’s New in R: May 20, 2024
May 20, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring an in-progress update to Modern Data Science with R, a tutorial on using flags for facetted plots, and a deep dive into avoiding overplotting. Let’s dive in!Modern Data Science with R This book, written by Benjamin S. Baumer, Daniel T. Kaplan, and Nicholas J. Horton, bills itself as “a comprehensive data science textbook for undergraduates that incorporates statistical and computational thinking to solve...
What’s New in R: May 13, 2024
May 13, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a Quarto extension to show when your document was most recently updated, animations of common functions, and a video to show you how to efficiently import hundreds of Excel files to R. Let’s dive in!Add last rendered or modified time to Quarto Say you’re working on an analysis in a Quarto document and you want to add a timestamp to show when it was last updated. How would you do this? You could write some code, of...
What’s New in R: May 6, 2024
May 6, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring not one, not two, but three data viz guides. Let’s dive in!UK Royal Statistical Society best practices for data visualization guide Released in July 2023, the UK Royal Statistical Society guide, Best Practices for Data Visualization, is a great resource to have on hand. Written by Andreas Krause, Nicola Rennie, and Brian Tarran, the guide has general guidance as well as code samples to help you make better data...
What’s New in R: April 29, 2024
April 29, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a tutorial on making a beautiful snow cover map, a walkthrough of approaches to making custom arrows in ggplot, and some food for thought on making your data analysis even more reproducible than it probably is today. Let’s dive in!Origin and development of a Snowflake Map We may be moving out of snow season, but if you’re down to explore a map showing snow cover in the United States, this blog post is for you! In...
