The ‘R Day report’ article from the 2018-1 issue.
R Day
R Day was planned as a satellite event of the 63rd RBRAS Annual
Meeting
The R Day was considered as a UFPR extension event, and as such it was non-profitable and with no registration fees. There were 295 subscribed participants. Figure 1 shows how they split between students, professional and others.
Figure 2 shows the spread of the participants’ home locations, for 88 of those who have opted for make geocoding information available on the subscription form. There was quite a spread, with all of the five country regions represented, an encouraging achievement considering the continental distances within the country. The fact the event was an RBRAS satellite helped to gather a wider audience.
An important feature was that the event was meant to be guided by the community, opened for proposals for oral presentations and tutorials for which there were 25 and 14 proposals, respectively. Time and space restrictions allowed for the selections of 18 oral presentations and 8 tutorials contemplating a diversity of topics related to R.
Three speakers were invited by the organising committee. Paulo
Justiniano Ribeiro Jr, senior lecture at the Department of Statistics at
UFPR and LEG member gave an historical review mixed with his own
experiences which are highly connected with the history of R in Brazil.
The full video of his talk was made available at Youtube
Rondon de Andrade Porto, data scientist at the Conselho Nacional de Justiça - CNJ (National Justice Council), showed how R is used to generate a large volume of visualizations and dynamic reports on the CNJ.
The R Day final talk was made by Gabriela de Queiroz (via webconference)
who can be seen in Figure 4. Gabriela is the founder of
R Ladies and told us how it all started and how it became an important
community for the diffusion of R in Brazil and worldwide. It was such an
inspiring talk that a few days later, the R Ladies Curitiba chapter was
founded
The number of participants, well above our expectations, and all the positive and enthusiastic feedbacks shows a clear demand for events gathering the community of R users in Brazil. The existing community is large, diverse and spread around the country. The objective is to promote regular R Day events for sharing expert knowledge and experience, and stimulate and strength relationships and networks. Figure 5 shows some of the participants who were there after the closing session.
Photos of the event are available at LEG’s page on Facebook
As R Day was so well received by the general community and by RBRAS meeting participants, the initial idea is to make R Day a regular satellite event. RBRAS meetings lasts for 3 days in even years, and for 5 days in odd years, and each year occurs in a different city of the country. That way, in even years, R Day could be organized in the city hosting the event. In odd years, we plan to make R Day in Curitiba, in a date that does not overlap with the RBRAS meeting, and maybe with 2 days duration.
We especially thank “The R Foundation” for endorsing R Day, particularly to Heather Turner, who contacted us and was always very kind and helpful to make this happen.
We thank all participants and the presenters, who offered to come
voluntarily to make R Day a great event. Also, we would like to thank
our sponsors
We also thank RBRAS for the partnership and support in making R Day a satellite event of its annual meeting.
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Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Mayer, et al., "R Day report", The R Journal, 2018
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2018-1-rday, author = {Mayer, Fernando P. and Zeviani, Walmes M. and Bonat, Wagner H. and Krainski, Elias T. and Jr, Paulo J. Ribeiro}, title = {R Day report}, journal = {The R Journal}, year = {2018}, note = {https://rjournal.github.io/}, volume = {10}, issue = {1}, issn = {2073-4859}, pages = {551-554} }