This post describes a few different aspects behind the scenes of the development of dittodb which recently went through the rOpenSci peer review process and was released to CRAN on 24 July 2020.This isn’t an introduction to the package itself (that’s available on dittodb’s site), but rather a look behind the scenes of the conceiving of the idea, the inspiration for, some of the development of, and history behind dittodb.

In March we held a Community Call discussing the maintenance of R packages.This call included a starting presentation by Julia Silge followed by a discussion featuring panelists with a wide variety of backgrounds: Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres and Scott Chamberlain.

This week we released a major new version of the rsvg package on CRAN. This package provides R bindings to librsvg2 which is a powerful system library for rendering svg images into bitmaps that can be displayed, or use for further processing in for example the magick package. The biggest change in this release is the R package on Windows and MacOS now includes the latest librsvg 2.48.4. This is a major upgrade;

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted all of our lives in a very short period of time.Spring and summer are usually very busy as students prepare to go the field to engage in various data collection efforts.The pandemic has also disrupted these carefully planned activities as travel is suspended and local and remote field stations have closed indefinitely.A lost field season can be a major setback for a dissertation timeline and

The R language has become very popular among scientists and analystsbecause it enables the rapid development of software and empowersscientific investigation. However, regardless of the language used,data analysis is usually complicated. Because of various projectcomplexities and time constraints, analytical software often reflectsthese challenges. “What did I measure? What analyses are relevant tothe study? Do I need to transform the data?

For this Community Call, we’re trying something different. We’ll start with a short talk by Julia Silge , then spend most of the time on Q & A with four panelists - Elin Waring , Erin Grand , Leonardo Collado-Torres , and Scott Chamberlain - moderated by Julia. Our panelists bring a wide range of perspectives so there’s something for everyone.

With services like Google Maps, finding the fastest route from A to B has become quick, cheap, and easy. Not just for driving but walking, cycling and public transport too. But in the field of transport studies, we often want not only a single route, but thousands or millions of routes.

The latest version of the rOpenSci av package includes some useful new tools for working with audio data. We have added functions for reading, cutting, converting, transforming, and plotting audio data in any popular audio / video format (mp3, mkv, aac, etc). The functionality can either be used by itself, or to prepare audio data for further analysis in R using other packages.

babette ¹ is a package to work with BEAST2 ² ,a software platform for Bayesian evolutionary analysis from R. babette is a spin-off of my own academic research.As a PhD I work on models of diversification: mathematical descriptionsof how species form new species.

As of earlier this year, we are now automatically building binaries and pkgdown documentation for all rOpenSci packages. One issue we encountered is that some packages include vignettes that require some special tools/data/credentials, which are unavailable on generic build servers. This post explains how to include such vignettes and articles in your package.