R Weekly 2025-W10 ellmer, Closeread Prize winnners, Rapid RAG Prototyping

03 Mar 2025

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

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

Highlight

• Announcing ellmer: A package for interacting with Large Language Models in R

• Winners of the Closeread Prize – Data-Driven Scrollytelling with Quarto

• Rapid RAG Prototyping: Building a Retrieval Augmented Generation Prototype with ellmer and DuckDB

Insights

• Announcing ellmer: A package for interacting with Large Language Models in R

• LLM + Quarto: Turn One-Off Reports Into Automated Solutions

• Share your data apps and docs more seamlessly on Connect Cloud

• January 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

• Q1 2025 tidymodels digest

• Understand geom_bar and its statistical transformations

• Analyzing targeted locus amplification (TLA) data

• Winners of the Closeread Prize – Data-Driven Scrollytelling with Quarto

• R in the Browser: Announcing Our WebAssembly Distribution

R in the Real World

• Pharmaverse Council Member updates

• R Submissions Working Group: Pilot 5 Launch and more!

R in Organizations

• Working with Clinical Trial Data? There’s a Pharmaverse Package for That

Resources

• CRANhaven - A repository for recently archived CRAN packages

New Packages

📦 Keep up to date wtih CRANberries 📦

CRAN

• {httpgd} 2.0.3: A ‘HTTP’ Server Graphics Device
• {awdb} 0.1.1: Query the USDA NWCC Air and Water Database REST API
• {cnd} 0.1.0: Create and Register Conditions
• {EpiSimR} 1.1: A ‘Shiny’ App to Simulate the Dynamics of Epidemic and Endemic Diseases Spread
• {xdvir} 0.1-2: Render ‘LaTeX’ in Plots ‘shiny’
• {crane} 0.1.0: Supplements the ‘gtsummary’ Package for Pharmaceutical Reporting

Updated Packages

🔍 Search on R-universe 🔍

• {cards} 0.5.1: Analysis Results Data - diffify
• {pander} 0.6.6: An R ‘Pandoc’ Writer - diffify
• {jobqueue} 1.5.1: Run Interruptible Code Asynchronously - diffify
• {xml2} 1.3.7: Parse XML - diffify
• {teal.modules.general} 0.4.0: General Modules for ‘teal’ Applications - diffify
• {teal.modules.clinical} 0.10.0: ‘teal’ Modules for Standard Clinical Outputs - diffify
• {rayrender} 0.38.10: Build and Raytrace 3D Scenes - diffify
• {r2rtf} 1.1.3: Easily Create Production-Ready Rich Text Format (RTF) Tables and Figures - diffify
• {odbc} 1.6.0: Connect to ODBC Compatible Databases (using the DBI Interface) - diffify
• {diseasystore} 0.3.1: Feature Stores for the ‘diseasy’ Framework - diffify
• {CNID} 2.0.2: Get Basic Information from Chinese ID Number - diffify
• {eq5d} 0.15.7: Methods for Analysing ‘EQ-5D’ Data and Calculating ‘EQ-5D’ Index Scores - diffify
• {splines2} 0.5.4: Regression Spline Functions and Classes - diffify
• {pmlbr} 0.3.0: Interface to the Penn Machine Learning Benchmarks Data Repository - diffify
• {healthdb} 0.4.0: Working with Healthcare Databases - diffify
• {censobr} 0.4.1: Download Data from Brazil’s Population Census - diffify
• {xslt} 1.5.1: Extensible Style-Sheet Language Transformations - diffify
• {readxl} 1.4.4: Read Excel Files - diffify
• {duckplyr} 1.0.1: A ‘DuckDB’-Backed Version of ‘dplyr’ - diffify
• {Rfast} 2.1.5: A Collection of Efficient and Extremely Fast R Functions - diffify
• {litedown} 0.6: A Lightweight Version of R Markdown - diffify
• {gtreg} 0.4.1: Regulatory Tables for Clinical Research - diffify
• {aplot} 0.2.5: Decorate a ‘ggplot’ with Associated Information - diffify
• {sasr} 0.1.4: ‘SAS’ Interface - diffify
• {tinytex} 0.56: Helper Functions to Install and Maintain TeX Live, and Compile LaTeX Documents - diffify
• {QuickJSR} 1.6.0: Interface for the ‘QuickJS’ Lightweight ‘JavaScript’ Engine - diffify
• {PatientProfiles} 1.3.0: Identify Characteristics of Patients in the OMOP Common Data Model - diffify
• {reproducibleRchunks} 1.0.3: Automated Reproducibility Checks for R Markdown Documents - diffify
• {simer} 1.0.0: Data Simulation for Life Science and Breeding - diffify
• {summarytools} 1.1.1: Tools to Quickly and Neatly Summarize Data - diffify
• {flexlsx} 0.3.4: Exporting ‘flextable’ to ‘xlsx’ Files - diffify
• {zippeR} 0.1.1: Working with United States ZIP Code and ZIP Code Tabulation Area Data - diffify
• {and} 0.1.6: Construct Natural-Language Lists with Internationalization - diffify
• {dittoViz} 1.0.3: User Friendly Data Visualization - diffify
• {brickset} 2025.0.0: Interface with the Brickset API for Getting Data About LEGO Sets - diffify
• {khroma} 1.16.0: Colour Schemes for Scientific Data Visualization - diffify
• {arkhe} 1.10.0: Tools for Cleaning Rectangular Data - diffify
• {akc} 0.9.9.1: Automatic Knowledge Classification - diffify
• {watcher} 0.1.2: Watch the File System for Changes - diffify
• {RPostgres} 1.4.8: C++ Interface to PostgreSQL - diffify
• {networktools} 1.6.0: Tools for Identifying Important Nodes in Networks - diffify
• {R.utils} 2.13.0: Various Programming Utilities - diffify
• {reticulate} 1.41.0: Interface to ‘Python’ - diffify
• {ggnewscale} 0.5.1: Multiple Fill and Colour Scales in ‘ggplot2’ - diffify
• {teal} 0.16.0: Exploratory Web Apps for Analyzing Clinical Trials Data - diffify
• {simDAG} 0.2.2: Simulate Data from a DAG and Associated Node Information - diffify
• {planr} 0.5.1: Tools for Supply Chain Management, Demand and Supply Planning - diffify
• {plotscaper} 0.2.8: Explore Your Data with Interactive Figures - diffify

Videos and Podcasts

• Listen to the R-Weekly Highlights Podcast

• R-Ladies Rome (English) - Interactive R, Python, and Shiny in the Browser with Quarto and Shinylive

• Master Data Extraction - Turn Texts into Tidy Data with R & {ellmer}

• Company-branded reports, apps, and dashboards made easier with brand.yml & Posit

Tutorials

• Checking your R packages and practicals on a schedule using GitHub Actions

• 3MW (Authentication for Quarto Projects on Azure)

• Dependency-light hex stickers with {gex}

• Web app with DeepSeek R1 and Hugging Face API for chatting

• How to Create Tables in R (With Examples) – A Comprehensive Guide Using Base R, dplyr, and data.table

• Rapid RAG Prototyping: Building a Retrieval Augmented Generation Prototype with ellmer and DuckDB

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

Call for Participation

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

• Frame-by-Frame Modeling and Validation of NFL geospatial data using gganimate in R workshop

• Introduction to Empirical Macroeconomics with R workshop

• Rix: reproducible data science environments with Nix

Grants & Funding

• 2025 ISC Grant Program

Connect

Join the Data Science Learning Community

rtistry

Post by @[email protected]

View on Mastodon

Quotes of the Week

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Happy #Rstats birthday!
R 1.0.0 was first released on February 29, 2000.
Does that make it 24 or just 6 leap-years old? pic.twitter.com/KpZordLXAt

— Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social (@datavisFriendly) March 1, 2025