R Weekly 2026-W05 LLMs & plots, soil flux, futurize

26 Jan 2026

• How to have (my) content shared by R Weekly?

This week’s release was curated by Jonathan Kitt, with help from the R Weekly team members and contributors.

Highlight

• LLMs interpret plots well, until expectations interfere
• Students, software, and soil flux
• futurize: Parallelize Common Functions via a “Magic” Touch

Insights

• Where Questions Become Queries: Meet querychat
• LLMs interpret plots well, until expectations interfere
• Announcing {typeR}: simulate live typing of R scripts
• futurize: Parallelize Common Functions via a “Magic” Touch

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R in the Real World

• Students, software, and soil flux
• nycOpenData: A Curated Interface for NYC Open Data

Tutorials

• Building an R Weekly Highlights Podcast Asisstant with Shiny
• Using {ellmer} for Dynamic Alt Text Generation in {shiny} Apps
• Bivariate chloropleths are go!

Resources

• rspatialdata
• Psy 6136: Categorical Data Analysis

New Packages

📦 Keep up to date wtih CRANberries 📦

CRAN

• {vecmatch} 1.3.0: Generalized Propensity Score Estimation and Matching for Multiple Groups
• {provolleyballr} 0.1.0: Extract Data from US Women’s Professional Volleyball Websites
• {orcidtr} 0.1.0: Retrieve Data from the ORCID Public API
• {querychat} 0.2.0: Filter and Query Data Frames in ‘shiny’ Using an LLM Chat Interface
• {futurize} 0.1.0: Parallelize Common Functions via One Magic Touch

Bioconductor

Updated Packages

🔍 Search on R-universe 🔍

CRAN

• {ncaavolleyballr} 0.5.1: Extract Data from NCAA Women’s and Men’s Volleyball Website
• {gtExtras} 0.6.2: Extending ‘gt’ for Beautiful HTML Tables - diffify
• {rix} 0.17.4: Reproducible Data Science Environments with ‘Nix’ - diffify
• {multiDEGGs} 1.1.2: Multi-Omic Differentially Expressed Gene-Gene Pairs - diffify
• {charlatan} 0.6.2: Make Fake Data - diffify

BioConductor

• {orthogene} 1.16.1: map genes within and across hundreds of species

Videos and Podcasts

• Listen to the R-Weekly Highlights Podcast
• Edinburgh R User Group - R Shiny App Development

Shiny Apps

• UK University Finance Dashboard

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

Updates from the R Contribution Working Group (RCWG): - Announcing R Dev Day \@ Rencontres R 2026: Nantes University, France or remote, Friday 19 June, 9am - 5pm (UTC+2). Join us to work on contributions to the code, documentation and translations in base R. Free and open registration, deadline Friday 29 May.

Call for Participation

• Open call for the rOpenSci Champions Program 2026!
• Posit::conf(2026) Call for Talks

Upcoming Events in 3 Months

Events in 3 Months:

• A list of R conferences and meetings

• This week’s local R-User and applied stats events

• Weekly R Workshops for Ukraine

Connect

Join the Data Science Learning Community

rtistry

Genuary Day 21: Bauhaus Poster. Create a poster design inspired by the German art school Bauhaus. #genuary #genuary2026 #genuary21 #RStats

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— Nicola Rennie (@nrennie.bsky.social) 21 janvier 2026 à 11:24

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Quotes of the Week

Me clicking \^ for several minutes until I get back to devtools::test() #R #RStats

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— jrdnbradford.bsky.social (@jrdnbradford.bsky.social) 21 janvier 2026 à 19:56

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