We are pleased to welcome our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Dan Sholler. Dan is an expert in qualitative research (yes, you read that correctly) and studies digital infrastructure creation, growth, and maintenance efforts. Through this research interest, he was drawn to the open science community and its ongoing development of tools and communities to support sustainable, reproducible, high-quality research.

Before everybody made their way to the unconf via LAX and Lyft, attendees discussed potential project ideas online. The packagemetrics package was our answer to two related issues. The first proposal centered on creating and formatting tables in a reproducible workflow.

What’s that? You’ve heard of R? You use R? You develop in R? You know someone else who’s mentioned R? Oh, you’re breathing? Well, in that case, welcome! Come join the R community! We recently had a group discussion at rOpenSci’s #runconf17 in Los Angeles, CA about the R community. I initially opened the issue on GitHub.

Excited to annonunce a new package called charlatan. While perusingpackages from other programming languages, I saw a neat Python librarycalled faker. charlatan is inspired from and ports many things from Python’shttps://github.com/joke2k/faker library. In turn, faker was inspired fromPHP’s faker,Perl’s Faker, andRuby’s faker. It appears that the PHPlibrary was the original - nice work PHP.Use cases What could you do with this package?

Two years ago at #runconf15, there was a great discussion about best practices for organizing R-based analysis projects that yielded a nice guidance document describing research compendia . Compendia, as we described them, were minimal products of reproducible research, using parts of R package structure to organize the inputs, analyses, and outputs of research projects.

Textual data and natural language processing are still a niche domain within the R ecosytstem.

And finally, we end our series of unconf project summaries (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4).mwparser Summary: Wikimarkup is the language used on Wikipedia and similar projects, and as such contains a lot of valuable data both for scientists studying collaborative systems and people studying things documented on or in Wikipedia.

Continuing our series of blog posts (day 1, day 2, day 3) this week about unconf 17.cityquant Summary: The goal with the cityquant project was to build a digital dashboard for sustainable cities. They also had a “spin-off” project called selfquant to get data from a quantified self google sheets template to keep track of weekly performance in various categories.

Continuing our series of blog posts (day 1, day 2) this week about unconf 17.available Summary: Ever have trouble naming your software package? Find a great name and realize it’s already taken on CRAN, or further along in development on GitHub? The available package makes it easy to check for valid, available names, and also checks various sources for any unintended meanings.

Following up on Stefanie’s recap of unconf 17, we are following up this entire week with summaries of projects developed at the event. We plan to highlight 4-5 projects each day, with detailed posts from a handful of teams to follow.checkers Summary: checkers is a framework for reviewing analysis projects. It provides automated checks for best practices, using extensions on the goodpractice package.