This is just a post to brag about that the CopenhagenR useR group is alive and kicking, again.

After COVID-19, the group (like so many other meetups) was on hiatus for a couple of years and without an organizer. In 2023, I thought I would try starting it again and, while it took a little while, I’m happy that I got together five great meetups for the spring 2024 season! Here’s a little bit about what went down.

CopenhagenR gratefully acknowledges the R Consortium as a sponsor. Also, a great thanks to Prosa, who generously provide a location for most meetups this spring 2024 season.

• State of the R, the New Stuff – Niels Ole Dam

First out was Niels Ole Dam who, very appropriately, set out to cover what has happened in the R world the last couple of years. His highlights included Quarto, webR, the GT package, and many other things. Check out his very sleek slides here.

• Reproducible Workflows with R and sequencing data – Adrian Geissler

Next out was Adrian Geissler, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen. His presentation focused on how to handle data management, reproducible workflows, and large scale computing in the life sciences using R for computation and snakemake for orchestration. Here are the presentation slides and a screencast of the presentation.

• Simplify making shiny apps with teal – Dawid Kałędkowski //
R and Software Freedom – Ramarro Marrone

In this double-header evening, Dawid Kałędkowski kicked things off with showcasing his package Teal — a shiny-based interactive exploration framework for quickly creating reproducible dashboards. Next up, Ramarro Marrone tackled the hot topic of software freedom, and went through which parts of the R world were freer and which could be considered non-free. This talk resulted in a heated debate that continued over the following coffee/cake/beer.

• Visualizing 440 bicycle rides using R – Gregers Kjerulf Dubrow

Gregers Kjerulf Dubrow presented a very personal analysis of all bike trips he made in Copenhagen in 2023, as tracked by the Strava fitness app. The first part of the talk detailed how to import and clean Strava data in R, the second part took a deep dive into the time-location bike data of the more than 440 bicycle rides (including a data anomaly that, in the end, turned out to have had a very real and dangerous cause). The full bike analysis is available on Gregers’ blog.

• Animating a melody as a mathematical object – Charles T. Gray

Rounding off the season, Charles T. Gray, former professional musician turned data scientist, gave us a peek into the musical world through the lens of graphs, nodes, and edges. Her presentation explored animating a midi file as graph using R packages like pyramidi, ggraph, and gganimate. Check out a post-version of her talk on her blog.