RStudio Conf Watch Party

We've rescheduled the watch party for RStudio Conf. We'll be watching two videos from the Conf, followed by a short discussion.

Parking in the Schnitzer Lot (the open air lot 1 block away from the building) after 6 PM is free. Parking in the Robertson Life Sciences building is not free.

You are free to hang out in the Atrium of the Robertson Life Sciences Building, but don't go into the auditorium before 6:15.

We'll be watching in 3A003A - If you go in via the south entrance and go the the 3rd floor, it's diagonally across the atrium and down the slope from the elevators.

Hope to see you there! There are plenty of seats in the theatre, so feel free to bring a friend!

Yihui Xie: pagedown: Creating beautiful PDFs with R Markdown and CSS

The traditional way to beautiful PDFs is often through LaTeX or Word, but have you ever thought of printing a web page to PDF? Web technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) are becoming more and more amazing. It is entirely possible to create high-quality PDFs through Google Chrome or Chromium now. Web pages are usually single-page documents, but they can be paginated thanks to the JavaScript library Paged.js, so that you can have elements like headers, footers, and page margins for the printing purpose. In this talk, we introduce a new R package, pagedown (https://github.com/rstudio/pagedown), to create PDF documents based on R Markdown and Paged.js. Applications of pagedown includes, but not limited to, books, articles, posters, resumes, letters, and business cards. With the power of CSS and JavaScript, you can typeset your documents with amazing elegance (e.g., a single line of CSS, "tr:nth-child(even) { background: #eee; }", will give you a striped table, and "border-radius: 50%;" gives you a circular element) and power (e.g., HTML Widgets).

and

Hilary Parker: Cultivating Creativity in Data Work

Traditionally, statistical training has focused primarily on mathematical derivations, proofs of statistical tests, and the general correctness of what methods to use for certain applications. However, this is only one dimension of the practice of doing analysis. Other dimensions include the technical mastery of a language and tooling system, and most importantly the construction of a convincing narrative tailored to a specific audience, with the ultimate goal of them accepting the analysis. These "softer" aspects of analysis are difficult to teach, perhaps more so when the field is framed as mathematics and often housed in mathematics departments. In this talk, I discuss an alternative framework for viewing the field, borrowing upon the past work in other fields such as design. Looking forward, we as a field can borrow from these fields to cultivate and hone the creative lens so necessary to the success of applied work.