Seeking community endorsement for an upgrade to Big Book of R

The R Consortium has opened a call for proposals seeking projects that improve the technical or social infrastructure of the R ecosystem.

For a long time now I’ve wanted to make some upgrades to the Big Book of R which will enhance it’s usability, stability and enhance the discovery of books most relevant to people’s needs.

For these upgrades I’ll need to hire assistance and I want to apply for this grant to cover their fees.

As part of my submission, I would like to show that I have community support and endorsement for this upgrade. I’ll provide some detail of what the upgrade will entail.

If you think this upgrade will be a positive contribution to the social infrastructure of the R ecosystem, please complete this short form.

I might use selected quotes as part of the proposal submission, and I might post all messages of support publicly. 

Plans for the upgrade

• Migrate the dataset from Google sheets backend to a proper relational database. This will make the data more stable, less prone to error and opens up future opportunities for API development.

• Improve upload functionality. I’ll need an interface to the database to administer entries.
  • Create a small shiny app to help me upload new books or edit entries, reduce duplications of entries.
  • Create automation that pulls Google form submissions and creates a github issue.
• Moderate data cleaning, especially of author entries and bios. There’s about a day’s worth of work that’s needed to clean up author info
• 🕮 Port from Bookdown to Quarto. Improves the styling and opens up future opportunities is for improvements as Quarto develops.
• Create a “Trending books” section. This will require pulling stats from the Plausible API (the analytics for the site). I’m excited to have this feature so people can see which books have been trending over 7/30 days.
• Create a “New Books” section that highlights the most recently added entries. Right now my blog posts are the only place people can find these new entries, but I’d like this to be programmatically displayed in the site itself.
• Scrape entries to add “latest update” date field to the book descriptions. This will also help me to start curating based on date, but allow visitors to determine if worth visiting based on the age of the book.
• And my ultimate dream of dreams , create a collapsible table of contents for each entry that lists the book chapters with hyperlink to that chapter. I think this will be a HUGE useability improvement i.e. being able to view a compact table of contents for each book from within Big Book of R. This is particularly useful when looking for something specific amongst many possible books. I think it will come up in the site Search feature as well. Jumping straight to the chapter of interest is another user experience improvement.

If you think this upgrade will be a positive contribution to the social infrastructure of the R ecosystem, please complete this short form.

I might use selected quotes as part of the proposal submission, and I might post all messages of support publicly. 

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