Ready4R (2025-11-24): Giving Thanks For All the Videos
Welcome to the Weekly Ready for R mailing list! If you need Ready for R course info, it's here. Past newsletters are available here.
Hi Everyone,
Another week of the newsletter. Mostly I'm reporting on videos this week, from PositConf and beyond.
Databot on NHANES
I have started recording videos again on my YouTube channel, trying out Databot, which I mentioned in the last newsletter for data exploration. Databot is the LLM built by Posit to help you explore your data. I recorded a couple videos using Databot to explore the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) data, which I have worked with in the past.
Let me know in the comments if you're interested in more videos like this.
PositConf Talks are Live on YouTube!
PositConf talks are now live on YouTube, including my own talk Empowering Learners with WebR, Pyodide, and Quarto - this was a really fun talk to put together, thinking about the various ways we have used WebR/Pyodide in training at the Fred Hutch Data Science Lab.
Do you use WebR/Pyodide for teaching? Let me know in the comments!
The Power of Social Learning
One of my favorite talks from PositConf this year was from Allissa Dillman called "From Solo to Social: Making Coding a Collaborative Adventure". In it, Allissa talked about how empowering it was working on code with others through hosting social events such as hackathons.
I especially liked Allissa's story about empowering two data librarians and watching them tackle harder and harder data tasks. A must watch!
{surveydown} package
Are you tired of giving Qualtrics your money and your data? You might want to consider the {surveydown} package for internal surveys. {surveydown} utilizes a database backend (currently postgresql), Shiny, and Quarto to let you implement your own surveys (note this requires a Shiny Server, Posit Connect instance, or shinyapps.io to deploy). This gives you full control of the survey techstack.
{surveydown} will generate two documents that power your survey: a survey.qmd and app.R. You mostly need to modify the survey.qmd template file. You can add questions to the survey using the sd_question() function, add conditional logic using sd_show_if(), and add pages with sd_next().
There are a wide variety of survey question types that are implemented, including text, textarea, multiple choice (mc) with differing formats, slider, daterange, and matrix questions for series of questions on a Likert scale. There is the ability to add your own custom question types, including leaflet maps and plotly plots.
Learn more at: https://surveydown.org/
Signing out
That's it for this week. Hope my fellow USA friends have a good Thanksgiving (Canadians, as always beat us to the punch).
Hope you all are doing well.
Best, Ted