Sustainability and EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) in the R Project
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: Statistics
Abstract
Many large scientific software projects depend heavily on the research community for their maintenance and development. In the case of R, the free software environment for data-analytic computing and graphics, the core developers have mainly been people in traditional academic roles, such as statistics professors. As such, their focus has been on aspects of development related to their areas of research, with other necessary functions being done as service, that may or may not be recognised by their institutions.
This paradigm has led to a crisis of sustainability for the R project, since there has been insufficient investment in establishing open, sustainable development practices or mentoring new contributors. Many of the current core developers are past or nearing retirement, leaving the R project in a precarious situation. Since R is widely used in the development of research software, this is an issue that the research community must urgently address.
The current model of core development has also led to a diversity problem. Contributing in a substantial way has required a privileged academic position, with the security and flexibility to make time for this work, which has favoured white men in high-income countries. Although the core developers have acknowledged this issue, a lack of time, along with a limited perspective of the barriers faced by under-represented groups, has meant that little action has been taken.
Through this fellowship, I aim to establish Research Software Engineers (RSEs) as part of the solution to creating more sustainable and inclusive large-scale research software projects. I will demonstrate how RSEs can be critical contributors, by modelling this role in the context of the R project. One aspect will be contributing to the maintenance and development of fundamental code in the R project, either the core R codebase, or important add-on packages that are (or will be) orphaned. Making these contributions as a woman myself will demonstrate the potential for RSE positions to support contributors from under-represented groups. It will also show the potential for RSEs to take on work that may be less desirable to people in traditional academic roles (since it does not represent novel research). However, I intend to go beyond this and also demonstrate how RSEs can contribute to promoting sustainability and inclusion. This aspect will form a large component of my work and involve activities such as helping to make the core development process more transparent, mentoring short-term projects, and providing training.
This paradigm has led to a crisis of sustainability for the R project, since there has been insufficient investment in establishing open, sustainable development practices or mentoring new contributors. Many of the current core developers are past or nearing retirement, leaving the R project in a precarious situation. Since R is widely used in the development of research software, this is an issue that the research community must urgently address.
The current model of core development has also led to a diversity problem. Contributing in a substantial way has required a privileged academic position, with the security and flexibility to make time for this work, which has favoured white men in high-income countries. Although the core developers have acknowledged this issue, a lack of time, along with a limited perspective of the barriers faced by under-represented groups, has meant that little action has been taken.
Through this fellowship, I aim to establish Research Software Engineers (RSEs) as part of the solution to creating more sustainable and inclusive large-scale research software projects. I will demonstrate how RSEs can be critical contributors, by modelling this role in the context of the R project. One aspect will be contributing to the maintenance and development of fundamental code in the R project, either the core R codebase, or important add-on packages that are (or will be) orphaned. Making these contributions as a woman myself will demonstrate the potential for RSE positions to support contributors from under-represented groups. It will also show the potential for RSEs to take on work that may be less desirable to people in traditional academic roles (since it does not represent novel research). However, I intend to go beyond this and also demonstrate how RSEs can contribute to promoting sustainability and inclusion. This aspect will form a large component of my work and involve activities such as helping to make the core development process more transparent, mentoring short-term projects, and providing training.
Organisations
Publications
Carnegie A
(2022)
The Epiverse-TRACE blueprints for software development (v 0.0.2)
Joo R
(2022)
Ten simple rules to host an inclusive conference
in PLOS Computational Biology
| Description | There were three technical aims and objectives of this fellowship. The first aim was to establish Research Software Engineers (RSEs) as critical sustainers of the open-source R project. As RSEs fully supported by the fellowship (one part-time), Heather Turner and Ella Kaye have contributed bug fixes and new functionality to the core codebase. Moreover, they have mentored others and contributed to infrastructure - novice-friendly tools, documentation, and events - resulting in many more contributions to R. They have been active in promoting initiatives of the fellowship within the RSE community, for example through RSE seminars, conferences, and communication channels, helping to attract other RSEs to begin contributing to R. The second aim was to enhance the development, across Warwick and more broadly, of research software using R. Heather and Ella developed multiple short courses to take people from getting started with R, through advanced R programming to R package development. The material has been adopted by the Academy for PhD Training in Statistics and taught to postgraduate students and research staff across departments at Warwick. Visitors hosted through the fellowship have provided further training for the community at Warwick, included a masterclass in Data Visualisation by R Core developer Paul Murrell. Heather has also engaged in training to support under-represented groups in the R community, for example R Package Development training for R-Ladies Remote and Advanced R training for the International Indian Statistical Association meeting. Heather regularly provides ad-hoc R support to researchers at Warwick by direct contact or through the research computing drop-in. She has also been invited to speak or provide advice on good software development practices, for example at the NHS-R Community Conference 2022 or the R You Ready? workshop (2022) to create a blueprint for the development of Epiverse-TRACE packages for epidemic response. The third aim was to effect cultural change in the R project such that sustainability and EDI are core concerns. Cultural change takes time and as the fellowship is ongoing, achieving this aim is still a work in progress. Nonetheless, members of the R Core Team (the core developers of R) have engaged with initiatives to on-board new contributors such as the Bug BBQ (2022), R Project Sprint 2023, multiple R Dev Days (2024) and R Contributor Office Hours. Some of these initiatives have made a particular effort to reach out to members of underrepresented groups and have been successful in attracting a diverse group of participants. We continue to build on these efforts in the final stages of the fellowship. In addition to the technical aims, there were personal aims for Heather Turner as PI on this fellowship. The first aim was to transition from statistical software consultancy to research software engineering. Taking on a full-time RSE position has naturally help to achieve this. In addition, Heather has become an active member of the RSE community and an ambassador for RSE careers and practice. The remaining aims were to advance her personal expertise in the development of R and establish herself as a leader and mentor of R contributors. These aims go hand in hand and the contributions made by Heather, her colleagues and people she has mentored demonstrate that she has achieved these aims. |
| Exploitation Route | The initiatives to engage contributors are of interest to others working on open source projects and they can learn from the talks and reports produced under the fellowship. Most of the infrastructure to support contributors to the R Project - novice-friendly tools, documentation and teaching materials - will remain available beyond the fellowship. After a while they may become dated; small updates may be made by the contributor community on a voluntary basis, larger updates may require funding for concerted effort. Most of the contributor events require more work than can be sustained on a voluntary basis. Nonetheless they provide a blueprint for future events, requiring less work than starting from scratch. Some one-off events may be able to be organized with a combination of volunteer effort and sponsorships from commercial/non-profit entities. As RSEs have become more involved in the contributor community, it is hoped that some may be able to incorporate contributing to the R Project as part of their role. RSEs are often granted a certain amount of free time for personal development and personal/unfunded projects; contributing to open source software projects such as R could be a part of this and could also cover mentoring/organizing low-key events to support contributors. Teaching materials developed in the fellowship are released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so they may be reused and remixed by others. Thus they remain a resource for R training at Warwick and beyond. Improvements made to R as a result of the fellowship will benefit users of R across sectors. R is particularly used in the life and environmental sciences, and public health. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Environment Healthcare Government Democracy and Justice Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology |
| Description | A significant element of this fellowship is community engagement, to support people in adopting R in their work or study and in developing their expertise in the use of R. Although the focus has been on the research community, engagement activities have reached beyond academia. Heather Turner has been an advisor to the R-Girls initiative, which has led to the development of open-source teaching materials that are used in schools within the UK and beyond. Both Heather Turner and Ella Kaye have maintained close links with the NHS-R community, which supports the use of R within the NHS. Through presentations at their annual conference, sharing materials and providing ad-hoc advice they have influenced staff training and practice. As a result of an R Dev Day, a data scientist from the Department for Education is now spending one day a month on contributing to the R project, developing their skills as part of this process, for example by participating in one of our study groups to learn how to program in C. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
| Sector | Education,Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Description | Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship |
| Amount | £4,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Software Sustainability Institute |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2025 |
| End | 03/2026 |
| Title | Google Season of Docs project: Expand and Reorganize the R Development Guide |
| Description | The R Project Google Season of Docs 2022 project (GSoD 22) expanded and revised the R Development Guide, an online book aimed at new contributors to the open source software R. New sections included the message translation infrastructure used by R; installing R from source on Linux and Windows, and a GitHub workflow for testing proposed patches. Heather Turner was a project administrator and a member of the steering committee for this project. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The improvements to the guide have assisted initiatives by the R Contributions Working Group to onboard new contributors to the open source software R. In particular, when mentoring new contributors in the R Contributor Office Hours or on the R Contributor Slack group, we have been able to point to some of the new sections which they have been able to follow in their own time to take the next step in their journey as open source contributors. |
| URL | https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/2022/participants |
| Title | Google Season of Docs project: useR! Knowledgebase and Infoboard |
| Description | The R Project Google Season of Docs 2021 project (GSoD 21) created an organizer knowledgebase and information dashboard for the useR! conference. Together they provide historical information on past useR! conferences and guidance for conference for the organizing team. This is an improvement to research infrastructure since useR! is the main, international conference of R users and developers, enabling knowledge exchange between academia and practitioners (usually around half of the participants are from business, government or the non-profit sector). The organizing team is required to have substantial involvement of academic partners who take this task on as a service, so reducing organisational effort gives more time to focus on research. Heather Turner was a project administrator and a member of the steering committee for this project. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The outputs from GSoD 21 are helping to preserve information from one year to the next, ensuring good practices are carried forward and avoiding time spent reinventing the wheel. This is particularly important in the context of equality, diversity and inclusion, to ensure that practices that had a positive impact on widening participation are carried forward, so that progress made in one year is not lost in subsequent years. Having information available in a more accessible and navigable format lightens the load on useR! volunteers and provides valuable information to other conference organizers and the wider R community. |
| URL | https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/2021/participants |
| Title | Maintenance of the useR! Infoboard and Survey |
| Description | Heather Turner mentored an externally-funding contractor to maintain the information dashboard for the useR! conference. Improvements include updating the data sources with data from 2021 onwards, extending the information displayed (e.g. to link to videos for talks), correcting some of the summaries and accommodating fully-virtual conferences. In addition, the contractor is updating the pipeline used to analyse the survey of useR! participants, to streamline the analysis of future surveys and to automatically generate updates for some of the data sources used by the information board. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | useR! is the main, international conference of R users and developers. The conference switched to virtual format in 2021 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and restarted in 2024 as an in-person event with a satellite virtual event. As the conference re-establishes itself, it is particularly important to share information from previous years and to monitor the impact of changes in format. |
| URL | https://rconf.gitlab.io/userinfoboard/ |
| Title | Collaborations Workshop Ideas & Pitches Website |
| Description | This website provides and browseable and searchable interface for Collaborative Ideas and Hack Day Pitches proposed at the Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop since 2018. As such, it provides a reference library of ideas for initiatives and projects related to research software engineering. Heather Turner contributed to the design and content of this tool. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Not aware of notable impacts from this tool. |
| URL | https://marioa.github.io/CW-ideas2/ |
| Title | PlackettLuce: Plackett-Luce Models for Rankings, v0.4.3 |
| Description | Functions to prepare rankings data and fit the Plackett-Luce model jointly attributed to Plackett (1975, doi:10.2307/2346567) and Luce (1959, ISBN:0486441369). This minor version release updated functions to read Preflib Election Data Files so that they work for the updated Preflib file formats. PrefLib is a reference library of preference data (https://www.preflib.org/). Heather Turner is co-author and maintainer of this software. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Not aware of any notable impacts from this specific improvement. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/PlackettLuce/index.html |
| Title | Preparing the Palmer Penguins Data for the datasets Package in R |
| Description | The Palmer Penguins data, contained in the palmerpenguins R package as the penguins and penguins_raw data frames, have become popular for data exploration and visualisation, particularly in an educational context. With a view to adding this data to the datasets package that is included in the base R distribution, this project contains the following: "./data-raw/penguins.R": a script to create penguins and penguins_raw from the data made available through the Environmental Data Initiative "./data/penguins.rda": the data file created from running "./data-raw/penguins.R" "./man/penguins.Rd": A documentation file for the penguins and penguins_raw datasets "./analysis/palmerpenguins-comparison.R": A script comparing our versions of penguins and penguins_raw with those in the palmerpenguins package "./analysis/Gorman_2014_reproduction.Rmd": A computational notebook reproducing Tables 1 and 2 from Gorman et al. (2014) "./analysis/Gorman_2014_reproduction.html": The result of rendering the above-mentioned notebook to html The data was originally published in Gorman et al. (2014). Their inclusion in the datasets package included in the base R distribution was motivated by Horst et al. (2022). |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The `penguins` and `penguins_raw` datasets have been included in R-devel, i.e. they will be incorporated into the release of R 4.5 |
| URL | https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.14902739 |
| Title | R 4.3.0 |
| Description | R is a software environment and programming language for data science. Several contributions were made to R version 4.3.0 as a result of the work of Heather Turner on this fellowship, either through direct contribution, mentored contribution or through the organization of events resulting in contributions: * Translations of errors, messages and warnings from American English to British English (~100 messages, direct), Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (~400 messages, indirect) * Code bug fixes (2 direct, 3 indirect, including PR#17616, PR#17863, PR#18367) * Documentation patches (1 direct, 1 indirect) |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | These contributions mostly bring minor improvements to users of R, however one bug fix corrected the `state.center` values for Alaska and Hawaii and this data set is known to be used by the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (USA state government) as a data analyst from that department reported the bug. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/NEWS.html |
| Title | R 4.4.0 |
| Description | R is a software environment and programming language for data science. Several contributions were made to the development version of R to be released as version 4.4.0 as a result of the work of Heather Turner and Ella Kaye on this fellowship, either through direct contribution, mentored contribution or through the organization of events resulting in contributions: * Translations of errors, messages and warnings from American English to British English (~ 12k messages, direct) * Enhancements (1 direct: Hexadecimal string colour specifications in short form, 1 indirect) * Code bug fixes (1 direct, 8 indirect; including PR#18660, PR#14359, PR#16752, PR#16856, PR#18362, PR#17871) * Documentation patches (7 indirect) |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | These contributions improve the behaviour of R for users, for example improving the speed of particular functions and improving documentation to help people use functions correctly and not waste time trying to understand unexpected behaviour. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/NEWS.html |
| Title | R 4.5.0 |
| Description | R is a software environment and programming language for data science. Several contributions were made to the development version of R to be released as version 4.5.0 as a result of the work of Heather Turner and Ella Kaye on this fellowship, either through direct contribution, mentored contribution or through the organization of events resulting in contributions: * Translations of errors, messages and warnings (~1k translations added/updated across 4 languages) * Enhancements (3 as [co-]author: new `penguins` dataset, new `gait` dataset, enabling `xyTable` to handle missing values; 1 as contributor: adding alpha mask support to Quartz graphics device; 4 as mentor/facilitator: updating `checkS3methods` to ignore deprecated/defunct functions, adding argument to `pdf()` to turn off inclusion of date, adding `rot` argument to `glyphInfo()` to define rotation angle of shapes within a font and improving pkg2HTML accessibility * Code bug fixes (5 as contributor: PR#15811, #PR17350, PR#18434, #PR18591, PR#18861,; 11 as mentor/facilitator, #PR15027, #PR17988, #PR18369, #PR18587, #PR17672, #PR18297, #PR18674, #PR18758, #PR18760, #PR18773, #PR18784 ) * Documentation patches (1 as [co-]author: PR#18732; 3 as mentor/facilitator: PR#16003, PR#18173, #PR18677). |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The datasets in R are often used in teaching materials. The penguins data has been available in an add-on package, adding it to base R means that new users do not have install additional packages for introductions to R using a modern data set. Unlike many of the simple data sets already in R, the `penguins` data have missing values, providing a more realistic example of data that may be encountered in practice. The presence of missing data in `penguins` revealed an issue with the `xyTable` function used by some graphical functions to count data for combinations of x and y variables. We updated this function so it can now handle missing data. The second dataset we added, the `gait` data, records the knee and hip angle over time for multiple children. This is an real-world example where it makes sense to store data as a three-way array. Previously, a two-way data set was reformatted as a three-way array for the purposes of an example, which is less motivating and helpful to users. The further bug fixes to code improve the behaviour of R for users, for example improving printed output and avoiding seg faults. The contributed translation enhance support for users in Latin America in particular (~800 of the updates were for Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese), while the documentation patches help people to use functions correctly and not waste time trying to understand unexpected behaviour |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/NEWS.html |
| Title | R Development Container v 0.2.0 |
| Description | A containerised development environment for editing and compiling the R source code. The environment contains the VSCode IDE and tools needed to compile R. Heather Turner is a co-author of this software. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | This container was designed to enable contributors to the open source R project to be able to quickly set up an environment to work on the R source code, without having to install anything on their computers. It was has been used to demonstrate basic contributor workflows during R Contributor Office Hours and was also used by novice developers during R Project Sprint 2023 to contribute enhancements to the source code of R. |
| URL | https://github.com/r-devel/r-dev-env/releases/tag/v0.2 |
| Title | R Development Container v 0.3.0 |
| Description | A containerised development environment for editing and compiling the R source code. Updates in this version were the result of a Google Summer of Code 2024 project co-mentored by Heather Turner. The updates adapted the container to work on Gitpod, as well as implementing a number of enhancements such as using an HTTP graphics device, adding helper scripts to work with multiple builds of R and extending the documentation. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The R Development Container was originally designed to work on GitHub Codespaces, meaning that contributors were reliant on GitHub Codespaces offering sufficient capacity to users free-of-charge. Enabling the container to work on Gitpod means that users can switch to Gitpod when they require more capacity. Supporting multiple platforms helps to ensure that the container will remain useful in the long term and Gitpod also provides an option for users that prefer to use open source tools. |
| URL | https://github.com/r-devel/r-dev-env/releases/tag/v0.3 |
| Title | R package: nlsCompare |
| Description | An R package to compare R functions designed to solve nonlinear least squares (nls) problems. Heather Turner is a contributor to this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | This package was developed as part of a Google Summer of Code 2021 project to compare alternative nonlinear least squares (nls) solvers in R. Therefore its primary benefit is to the co-authors and other researchers, e.g., authors of R packages that provide nls functions, for validation and benchmarking purposes. Applying the package during the project produced some interesting results, such as a case where a solver outperformed the reference solver, generating some promising directions for future research. Heather Turner is a contributor to this package. |
| URL | https://github.com/ArkaB-DS/nlsCompare |
| Title | RmdConcord: Concordances for 'R Markdown' v0.1.4 |
| Description | This package supports concordances in 'R Markdown' documents. R Markdown is a form of literate programming that allows you to include R code chunks in a document that uses the Markdown language to mark up text. During compilation, the R Markdown file is first converted to a regular Markdown file by replacing each code chunk with the output of the running that code, then the Markdown file is converted to the final HTML output, that has both the output of the code and formatted text. A concordance is a mapping between lines in the HTML file and lines in the original R Markdown file. Heather Turner is a contributor to this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | This software has only just been released, however it will be useful for tracing back errors produced by programs such as HTML Tidy that report only the HTML line numbers. Since HTML Tidy is used by the package checking tool included with R (R CMD check), this is particularly helpful for R package developers. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/package=RmdConcord |
| Title | certificate: R package for generating workshop attendance certificates |
| Description | This package is a spin-off from the fwdbrand package from the R Forwards taskforce, for generating certificates of attendance. Heather Turner is a co-author and maintainer of this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | This package was used to provide certificates of attendance for participants of the Collaboration Campfires, so that they could count attendance as continuing professional development. |
| URL | https://github.com/forwards/certificate |
| Title | gnm: package for generalized nonlinear models, v1.1-2 |
| Description | The gnm R package provides function to specify and fit generalized nonlinear models. This new release extended the `Symm()` function to handle more than two factors. Heather Turner is a co-author and maintainer of this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | This update allows the Complete Symmetry model to be estimated with more than two categorical factors, such as the example in Table 8.5 of Analysis of Ordinal Categorical Data (Agresti, 2010, DOI:10.1002/9780470594001). |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/package=gnm |
| Title | gnm: package for generalized nonlinear models, v1.1-3 to v1.1-5 |
| Description | The gnm R package provides function to specify and fit generalized nonlinear models. This set of minor releases fixed some reported issues and improved behaviour, including handling inestimable linear parameters and enabling gnm functions to be used within custom functions. Heather Turner is a co-author and maintainer of this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The updates improved reliability of the VFP R package for variance function estimation that depends on gnm (developed by a team at Roche Diagnostics). |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/package=gnm |
| Title | prefio: Structures for Preference Data v0.1.0 |
| Description | This package spins-out the data structures and input/output methods for preference data that Heather Turner introduced in the PlackettLuce package. The code has been refactored to be more general, so that these data structures and methods can be used across different packages designed for the analysis of preference data. Heather Turner is a co-author of this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The software has only just been released for the first time, however the intention is for PlackettLuce and potentially other packages to be refactored to depend on this data management package, rather than each package defining their own data structures and methods. The package may also be of use independently, for handling preference data in R. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/package=prefio |
| Title | rebib : Parse/Convert embedded LaTeX bibliography to BibTeX, v0.01-0.17 |
| Description | This package was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2022 to convert the formatted bibliography in a LaTeX file (.bbl format) to a BibTeX bibliography (.bib format) for re-processing. Heather Turner is a contributor to this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | In 2021, The R Journal introduced a new HTML format and since then there has been a gradual transition from the legacy PDF format. Past instructions for authors asked them to embed the formatted bibliography generated by BibTeX into their LaTeX source file. This package converts the embedded bibliography to a .bib file, which is more useful when converting the article to HTML. This package is a dependency of the texor package, created under the same GSoC project. Together, the two packages enable previously published R Journal articles to be converted to HTML, which is easier to browse and more accessible for users of assistive tools and technologies such as screen readers. |
| URL | https://github.com/Abhi-1U/rebib |
| Title | rebib : Parse/Convert embedded LaTeX bibliography to BibTeX, v0.2.2-0.3.2 |
| Description | These updates to the rebib package were part of A Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023 project co-mentored by Heather Turner. These updates were mainly bug fixes to enable the package to work more reliably on formatted bibliographies found in the LaTeX source code of the R Journal archive. The updates brought the package up to a standard suitable for publishing on the CRAN repository. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Part of the GSoC 2023 project was to apply the package to the archive of R Journal articles from 2009 to 2022, to create HTML versions of articles previously only available in PDF. The HTML versions are due to be incorporated into the R Journal website, which will improve the accessibility of these articles. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/package=rebib |
| Title | texor : Tools for converting LaTeX source files into RJ-web-articles, v1.0.1-1.3.0 |
| Description | These updates to the texor R package were a result of a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023 project co-mentored by Heather Turner. The updates resolved many outstanding issues from initial work under GSoC 2022, bringing the package up to a standard suitable for publishing on the CRAN repository. The updates enabled higher quality conversions of the LaTeX source code for R Journal articles to HTML. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Part of the GSoC 2023 project was to apply the package to the archive of R Journal articles from 2009 to 2022, to create HTML versions of articles previously only available in PDF. The HTML versions are due to be incorporated into the R Journal website, which will improve the accessibility of these articles. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/package=texor |
| Title | texor : Tools for converting LaTeX source files into RJ-web-articles, v0.5.2-0.6.9 |
| Description | This package was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2022 to aid the conversion of LaTeX source files to HTML. A basic conversion can be achieved with pandoc, but equations, code blocks, tables, figures, cross-references and other aspects of the document may not be correctly converted. The texor package handles many of these issues to reduce the manual post-editing required. Heather Turner is a contributor to this package. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | In 2021, The R Journal introduced a new HTML format and since then there has been a gradual transition from the legacy PDF format. This package enables previously published articles to be converted to HTML, which is easier to browse and more accessible for users of assistive tools and technologies such as screen readers. |
| URL | https://github.com/Abhi-1U/texor |
| Title | texor : Tools for converting LaTeX source files into RJ-web-articles, v1.4.0.1-1.5.0 |
| Description | Major updates to the texor R package in these versions were a result of a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 project co-mentored by Heather Turner. These updates added the capability to convert Sweave files - a legacy format for literate programming that outputs PDF - to R markdown or Quarto files - modern formats for literate programming that output to HTML. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The tools added to texor make it easier for R developers to convert documents created using the legacy Sweave format to a modern format such as R markdown or Quarto. A particular use case is for R package maintainers to transition their long-form documentation files, so that these documents can be provided to uses in HTML rather than PDF. HTML is a much more accessible format and is preferred by users for browsing documentation. |
| URL | https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=texor |
| Description | A Book Dash for the R Development Guide |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal, an RSE at Imperial, visited us at Warwick for a focused sprint working on improvements to the R Development Guide. During the week of her visit we engaged with other RSEs at Warwick and external contributors, to collaborate on this work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://forwards.github.io/blog/2024/rdevguide/ |
| Description | Bug BBQ |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The Bug Barbecue (Bug BBQ) was a global, online event spread over 24 hours, in which new and experienced contributors can help to address open bugs in R. For new contributors, the event gave an introduction to the R development process and the opportunity to learn from more experienced contributors. For all participants - even members of the R Core team - the event provided a dedicated time to work on maintaining this open source project, which can be hard to find time for on top of other commitments. Heather Turner co-organized this event with members of the R Contribution Working Group. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://github.com/r-devel/rcontribution/blob/main/bug_bbq/Bug_BBQ_retrospective.md |
| Description | C Study Group for R Contributors |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner and Ella Kaye facilitated a study group for around a dozen people across two cohorts, to help them learn/improve their skills in C programming, as an on-ramp to contributing to the open source R project. Several participants in the 2023 group also participated in R Project Sprint 2023, where some made contributions that required updating the C code within R. Originally intended as a precursor to R Project Sprint 2023, repeats of the study group were organized in 2024 and 2025 in response to community demand and have led to contributions involving C made at R Dev Days or on an ad-hoc basis. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023,2024,2025 |
| URL | https://contributor.r-project.org/events/c-book-club-2023/ |
| Description | Collaboration Campfires |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The Collaboration Campfires were a series of online collaborative events to open pathways for members of groups currently underrepresented in the R project. The goal was to demystify the R development process and highlight ways that R programmers can contribute, with a focus on low-level contributions in terms of time commitment and prerequisite knowledge. Some of the participants have gone on to become more involved in the R Contributor community, attending other events organized by the R Contribution Working Group, including a translation hackathon which resulted in new/updated translations being committed to the core R codebase. Heather Turner co-organized these events with Saranjeet Kaur, as part of the Code for Science and Society Digital Infrastructure Incubator. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://contributor.r-project.org/events/collaboration-campfires |
| Description | Computer Science for Fun Blog Post: Equality, diversity and inclusion in the R Project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner's work on this fellowship was highlighted in a post on the "Computer Science for Fun" blog. The blog is part of a schools engagement project, with posts on a variety of computing topics, including current computer science research. Articles are written for the 14+ age group, though they are often mediated by teachers who share the content in their classrooms. The post discussed Heather's work to improve sustainability and EDI in the R project and also Research Software Engineering careers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://cs4fn.blog/2024/01/03/equality-diversity-and-inclusion-in-the-r-project-collaborative-commun... |
| Description | Fireside chat useR! 2024 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This was part of a series of "Fireside Chats" arranged with keynote speakers in the run-up to the useR! 2024 conference. I was invited to join keynote speaker Abhishek Ulayil to discuss "Building foundations for R's future as an accessible and diverse collaboration". The discussion was posted on YouTube on 21 May 2024 and has received over 100 views as 12 March 2025. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/18-QFbLC2cY?list=PL77T87Q0eoJgBiFib9R2JNK3eMFpWOlXW |
| Description | Incubator: The role of the R community in the RSE movement |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner co-organised an incubator session at the useR! 2021 conference on "The role of the R community in the RSE movement". It brought together around 30 members of the R community, with representatives from Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Oceania. The group ranged from people that had not heard of the term "Research Software Engineer" to people that had RSE as their job title. The event consisted of a short talk on the RSE movement by an invited representative from the Society of RSE (SocRSE), followed by breakout discussions on topics such as promoting RSE career paths and promoting RSE skills within the R community. The event helped to raise awareness of the RSE profession and ways to connect to the RSE community. An #r-users channel was created on the RSE Slack workspace, which 42 people have joined. People were encouraged to join the Society of RSE (SocRSE) and participate in the online SeptembRSE conference. One incubator attendee, Kim Martin, was subsequently awarded a Software Sustainability Institute fellowship to promote RSE skills at Stellenbosch University, S. Africa (https://fellows.software.ac.uk/fellow/kim-martin/) and credits useR! as a turning point. Another attendee, Saranjeet Kaur, was selected for the Open Life Science mentoring & training program to launch an RSE Association in Asia, inspired by SocRSE (https://openlifesci.org/ols-4/projects-participants/). Yet another attendee, Matt Bannert, has started recording a series of podcast episodes for the RSE Stories podcast (http://us-rse.org/rse-stories/about/, episodes yet to be aired). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://user2021.r-project.org/blog/2021/09/04/role-of-r-in-research-software-engineering/ |
| Description | Letter to Nature Correspondence |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This letter was written by members of the global organizing team for the online useR! 2021 conference, including Heather Turner. Due to the restriction on the number of authors for this format, a single author submitted the correspondence on behalf of the team. The intention of the letter was to encourage professionals across domains to keep (scientific) conferences online, even when the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, in the interests of equality, diversity and inclusion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02752-8 |
| Description | Monthly rainbowR meet-ups. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Since 2022, Ella Kaye has been running regular meetings of rainbowR, a community that promotes, supports and connects LGBTQ+ people who code in R. At these events, community members share what they are working on, and Ella often uses them as an opportunity to encourage members to be more involved in contributing to R. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023,2024,2025 |
| URL | https://rainbowr.org/meetups |
| Description | News from the Forwards Taskforce (R Journal) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner writes a regular news column for the R Journal, updating R users and developers about the activities of Forwards, the R Foundation taskforce for women and underrepresented groups. As chair of the taskforce, Heather rounds up the news from the different sub-teams. This covers Forwards' involvement in community groups, conference organization, initiatives to help R users advance their knowledge and experience of R development, collection and analysis of data related to equality, diversity and inclusion in the R community. This helps to raise awareness of the work of Forwards and to give credit to the people involved, who do this as service work, often in their spare time. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022,2023,2024 |
| URL | https://journal.r-project.org/news.html |
| Description | Post on R Blog: "R Can Use Your Help: Translating R Messages" |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner co-wrote this blog post with Saranjeet Kaur, a member of the R Contribution Working Group. The post was intended to inform people about the current status of message translations in the R codebase and encourage people to get involved in contribution. As a result, several people joined the R Contributors Slack group to find out more and/or started contributing via the new Weblate server, an online platform facilitating translation. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://blog.r-project.org/2022/07/25/r-can-use-your-help-translating-r-messages/index.html |
| Description | R Consortium Blog post: Comeback! Reviving the Warwick R User Group with In-Person and Online Events |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | As a member of the organizing team of the Warwick R User Group, Heather Turner was interviewed about the team's experience re-building the group after the COVID-19 pandemic. The blog post was liked and shared by dozens of people across social media outlets. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.r-consortium.org/blog/2023/01/25/comeback-reviving-the-warwick-r-user-group-with-in-pers... |
| Description | R Contributor Office Hours |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner and Ella Kaye, along with colleagues from the R Contribution Working Group, facilitate office hours for contributors to R. These events have attracted people that want to find out more about contributing and we have been able to provide information, give live demonstrations and guide them towards next steps. The events have also attracted existing contributors who have got stuck on some technical detail or want advice on how to progress the issue they are working on. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023,2024,2025 |
| URL | https://contributor.r-project.org/events/office-hours/ |
| Description | R Contributors Video: How to Make a Contribution to Base R |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner and Ella Kaye created this video demonstration of how to make a contribution to the open source R project for the Software Sustainability Institute Collaborations Workshop in May 2023. It was subsequently put on the SSI YouTube Channel and highlighted on the front page of the R Contributors website, https://contributor.r-project.org/, which aims to engage people in contributing to R. As of March 2024, the video has been viewed by more than 250 people, with comments and thumbs up to indicate that people found it helpful. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOlF8fPf9v8 |
| Description | R Contributors Website |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner expanded the R Contributors website, to create a more substantial resource for people interested in contributing to the R Project. She added an events page, tutorials, links to resources such as the R Developer Blog, the R Development Guide and a dashboard for tracking development of the R project. She also obtained approval from the R Foundation to link directly from the main R Project website and moved to an official subdomain: contributor.r-project.org. As of 12 March 2022, website analytics show over 2000 unique visitors since moving to the new subdomain at the beginning on January 2022, with several hundred visitors exploring key subpages, e.g. the joining page for the R-devel Slack, the information page for the R Contribution Working Group and the events page for the Collaboration Campfires aimed at novice contributors. Visitors come from all major geographical regions, the top 10 countries by number of visitors are USA, UK, India, China, Brazil, Germany, Russian Federation, Indonesia and Australia. The improved website and new subdomain have attracted more members to the R-Devel Slack workspace and supported other engagement activities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://contributor.r-project.org/ |
| Description | R Dev Day |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | R Dev Days are satellite events to national and international conferences, providing the opportunity for experienced and aspiring contributors to collaborate on contributions to the open source R Project. In 2024, R Dev Days were organised in collaboration with London satRday (London, UK); useR! (Salzburg, Austria); posit::conf (Seattle, USA); RSECon24 (Sheffield, UK); Shiny in Production 2024 (Sheffield, UK), and LatinR (virtual). The number of participants ranged from 9 to 44; the R Core Team was represented at all international events. Heather Turner led the organisation of these events and Ella Kaye was a co-organizer in most cases. Participants worked on contributions to the code, documentation or translations in the R source files, as well as to contributor infrastructure such as the R Development Guide and the R Development Container. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://contributor.r-project.org/events/r-dev-days/ |
| Description | R Project Sprint 2023 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This 3-day event gave the opportunity for experienced and aspiring contributors to collaborate with members of the R Core Team on contributions to the open source R Project. There were 55 participants, around half self-identified as belonging to one or more underrepresented groups. Participants contributed to the code, documentation or translations in the R source files (the translations localize English messages to other languages). Around 2000 message translations over 14 languages were worked on during the sprint, mainly suggesting new or updated translations (translations can also be approved, marked for edit or deleted). The documentation team triaged open bug reports and worked on 14 of these, closing 7 by the end of the sprint. Code contributions included work on new functionality, refactoring, improving behaviour, and bug fixes. Only a few coding issues were closed by the end of the sprint, but there was a lot of in-progress work and over a dozen coding issues were closed within two months. For around half the participants outside the core team it was their first time working on the R sources. The event prompted positive feedback from the full range of participants, with many keen to participate in similar events in future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://contributor.r-project.org/r-project-sprint-2023/ |
| Description | R translatón/Hackaton de tradução do R |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner supported local organizers to put on this translation hackathon as a satellite to the LatinR2022 conference, to specifically encourage contributions to the Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese translations in R. The event attracted completely new contributors as well as those with some experience. During the event, the participants contributed around 500 message translations and some have continued to participate since. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LURMdf1Uk8 |
| Description | R-Ladies Remote Package Development Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner co-taught an R Package Development workshop for R-Ladies Remote, using the materials created by the teaching team of Forwards, the R Foundation taskforce for underrepresented groups. The workshop was split into four 1-hour modules over 4 weeks, enabling people to attend modules according to their availability and prior knowledge/experience. Around 25 people attended in total. Several participants of the workshop joined the R-Ladies Remote Slack, which is where the regular activity of the R-Ladies Remote chapter takes place. The workshops were recorded and the videos were shared in the Slack workspace, so that people could catch up later. Since the workshop was delivered live, it was only practical for R users in the Americas, Europe and Africa to attend, however there was interest in repeating the series at a time suited to Asia and Oceania. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.meetup.com/rladies-remote/events/qvxsrsydccbwb/ |
| Description | RSE Midlands 2024 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner and Ella Kaye were part of the organizing team for this event, where around 50 people gathered to explore research software engineering practice in the Midlands, with a particular focus on Warwick University, as the host institution. Many participants were research software engineers or working in related roles, but the event also attracted researchers that use or were interested to use RSE services and postgraduates interested in RSE careers. Ella Kaye led a discussion on RSEs as part of the research infrastructure, bringing in perspectives from both RSEs and people (potentially) working with RSEs. Participants reported that they found the event informative with takeaways they could apply to their work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://rse-midlands.github.io/docs/event-7th-march-2024/ |
| Description | RSE incubator blog post |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Blog post reporting on an incubator session that Heather Turner co-organized at the global useR! conference on the role of the R community in the research software engineering movement. The blog post was intended to increase the impact of the interactive, live session, which involved 7 breakout discussions that were not recorded. The post includes a recording of the short talk at the start of the session given by a representative of the Society of Research Engineering, that has been viewed 381 times (as of 7 March 2022). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://user2021.r-project.org/blog/2021/09/04/role-of-r-in-research-software-engineering/ |
| Description | Research Software Engineering in Data & AI Workshop 2023 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Around 45 participants attended this event to explore the role of research software engineering in the field of data science and AI. Participants included several delegates from charitable research institutes (Biomathematics & Statistics Scotland, UK Dementia Research Institute, Rosalind Franklin Institute); industry (Ordnance Survey, Quansight), and the NHS (Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Trust, NHS Grampian, Liverpool University Hospitals Trust). Ella Kaye presented the work of our fellowship at the workshop. As a result, one person applied and was selected to participate in R Project Sprint 2023. Another co-mentored a Google Summer of Code project with Heather Turner resulting in a containerized development environment to facilitate contribution to R. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://warwick.ac.uk/research/data-science/warwick-data/news/events/research-software-engineering-w... |
| Description | SocRSE blog post (2021 RSE Fellows series) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Blog post as part of a series introducing the 2021 RSE Fellows, intended to promote our activities to the research software engineering community and beyond. For Heather Turner, the post helped to promote her fellowship plans to the wider community of R users and developers, in academia and industry. The post included a 2 minute video used to promote the blog post on Twitter, which has been viewed more than 2500 times as of 7 March 2022 (https://twitter.com/ResearchSoftEng/status/1422866514382893060?s=20&t=Oxfuz0-AmNGsCEa7MZM2Jw). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://society-rse.org/getting-to-know-your-2021-rse-fellows-heather-turner/ |
| Description | The R Podcast: Collaboration Campfires Episode |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner was interviewed along with a collaborator Saranjeet Kaur on an episode of The R Podcast, a long-established podcast of the R community. They were promoting the Collaboration Campfires, a series of events that they were organizing to encourage new contributors to the R project. This gave an opportunity to discuss the broader context of efforts to improve sustainability and equality, diversity and inclusion in the R project. The podcast stimulated some discussion on Twitter about this broader context. A potential industrial collaborator based in Canada connected over LinkedIn as a result of listening to the podcast and arranged a meeting during a later visit to the UK. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://r-podcast.org/034-collaborative-campfires/ |
| Description | Warwick R User Group: R Project Sprint 2023 Report Back |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Around 15 members of the local statistical/R user community joined a special meetup reporting back on R Project Sprint 2023. The aim of the event was to share the activities of the sprint with a broader audience, who might not consider contributing to R themselves but were interested to find out more about the type of work that goes on. The event occurred part-way through the sprint, so local R users had the opportunity to meet high-profile R developers from the international community, including several members of the R Core Team. The event sparked interest in students about potential future involvement. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.meetup.com/warwickrug/events/295067949/ |
| Description | Warwick RSEs |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner established a termly meeting to promote research software engineering at Warwick. The event helps to connect people working in RSE-related roles across faculties and groups, and to promote the work on RSEs to a wider audience. This has been particularly relevant to early career researchers who were previous unaware of the RSE profession or the role of RSEs in research. Heather organised these meetings from Autumn 2021 to Summer 2024 and has now passed the organisation on to two RSEs in the Research Computing group for long-term sustainability. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022,2023,2024 |
| URL | https://warwick.ac.uk/research/rtp/sc/rse/hub/warwick-rse-meetings |
| Description | Workshop on Parallel Computing in R |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This workshop was intended to introduce R users to parallel computing in the context of high performance computing (HPC) clusters, to encourage wider use of Sulis, a Tier-2 HPC platform hosted at Warwick University. The workshop was open to any UK researcher or anyone that might collaborate with a UK researcher. Heather Turner helped to plan the workshop, including defining the scope, recommending and inviting an external tutor, reviewing tutorial materials and assisting during the workshop. The external tutor was Michael Schubert (Netherlands Cancer Institute), the author of a key package to facilitate working on HPC platforms using R. There were around 20 participants at the workshop, mainly from Warwick, but including participants from several other UK universities. In addition to upskilling intended participants, the workshop enabled Heather and other Research Software Engineers at Warwick to fill gaps in their knowledge, equipping them to provide better support for R users that want to use HPC facilities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://warwick.ac.uk/research/rtp/sc/sulis/events/parallelr/ |
| Description | rOpenSci Champions Walkthrough: How to contribute to base R |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Heather Turner led this walk-through for the small group of participants on the rOpenSci champions program (2023). The general program was designed to train people from underrepresented groups to develop and/or review R packages. This session was intended to show champions and their mentors how they might contribute to R itself. Following the session one mentor submitted a patch to fix a bug used as an example in the demo and another mentor has since applied to attend an R Developer Day where participants will collaborate on contributions to R. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://ropensci.org/blog/2023/08/04/champions-program-training/ |
| Description | rainbowR relaunch |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | rainbowR is a community of LGBTQ+ people who code in R. It was founded in 2017, but was dormant from 2019-2022. Heather Turner and Ella Kaye spearheaded the relaunch in 2022 and the community has been active since, allowing them to reach a wide audience of R users/programmers and encourage them to be more involved in contributing to R. This work directly lead to members of the rainbowR community participating the R Project Spring 2023, at least one of whom would definitely not have attended had it not been for rainbowR. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://rainbowr.netlify.app |