LatinR 2022

ReproHack in LatinR 2020

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On Thursday 8 October 2020, a scientific reproducibility hackathon was carried out within the conference activities. This hackathon was organized by the LatinR team in conjunction with the ReproHack community ♻️.

There were two ways of participation in the hackathon: (1) As an author: sending your article so participants try to reproduce it on the day of the event. (2) Attending the hackathon: Those who participated were able to learn from the experience of trying to get back the results and leave comments to the authors.

In a relaxed atmosphere, we met people from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Spain and the United Kingdom to spend an afternoon sharing information on reproducibility and working on the articles.

During the hackathon we had 4 talks (in Spanish!) that were recorded on a special playlist on the LatinR YouTube channel and you can access them here.

Maëlle Salmon and Miguel Alvarez in turn recorded two videos representing the ROpenSci community. The videos were shown on the day of the event, and Anna Krystalli, founder of ReproHack and also editor of ROpenSci, answered live questions.

Participating in the organization (in alphabetical order): Juliana Benitez, Florencia D’Andrea, Anna Krystalli, Daniela Gawehns, Priscila Minotti, David Pérez-Suárez and Roxana Villafañe.

👩‍💻 Do you want to know more about ReproHack?

Here is some information of interest about this community and computational reproducibility (in English):

👉 Join the ReproHack Slack!

ReproHack team (In alphabetical order): Florencia D’Andrea, Daniela Gawehns, Anna Krystalli, Linda Nab, Riccarda Propart and Paloma Rojas-Saunero.

We thank the RSE group of the University of Sheffield and The Software Sustainability Institute for supporting ReproHack.

Latin American communities and organizations: useR!2020 video

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted:

This useR!2020 session and video was organized by Laura Acion, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Paola Corrales, and Paloma Rojas Saunero. Leonardo Collado Torres coordinated the blog post submission. This blog post was originally submitted to the R Consortium blog and published there on July 7th 2020.

On June 19th 2020 we filmed a video for useR!2020 showcasing the communities and organizations we are involved in that are for Latin Americans or have Latin American participants. In this blog post, we wanted to highlight these initiatives and remind everyone that we are more than happy to help you launch similar initiatives in your local communities.

LatinR: LatinR is a trilingual international conference on the use of R in research and development across Latin America. Since launching in 2018, our annual meetings have been a starting point for new packages, local user groups, reading clubs, R-Ladies chapters, translations, and other initiatives in the region.
ConectaR: ConectaR 2019 took place during January 24-26, 2019 at the University of Costa Rica, in San José, Costa Rica. It was the first event in Central America endorsed by The R Foundation, and it was held completely in Spanish. You can find more information here.
satRday: satRday is a conference about R and its applications, that happens all over the world, and it is organized by the local community. Two satRdays events happened in Latin America: in Santiago - Chile and São Paulo - Brazil. If you want to organize a satRday anywhere in Latin America, please get it touch so we can help each other!
R-Ladies: R-Ladies is a global organisation that promotes gender diversity in the R community. It has 123 active chapters in 51 countries around the world, of which 49 are found across 10 Latin American countries. Some Latin Americans are part of the R-Ladies Global Team, including its leadership. COVID-19 has not stopped us, instead, we have migrated online and fostered alliances among different chapters. All in an effort to give gender minorities in the R community the opportunity to learn R in a safe and supportive environment. Join us!
rOpenSci: R for open science, rOpenSci, provides free technical review of R packages to improve the quality of open source software in order to maximize readability, usability, usefulness, and minimize redundancy. Their peer-review process will soon be translated to Spanish and you can get involved!
CDSB: the Community of Bioinformatics Software Developers (CDSB in Spanish) was born in 2018 with the goal of helping Latin American R users become R & Bioconductor developers and increase the representation of Latinx in these communities. For more information about CDSB check bit.ly/cdsbpost2020.
RUGs: there are several R User Groups in Latin America, some of which are officially sponsored by the R Consortium. We believe that creating a welcoming space is crucial for keeping the ideas flowing, which allows for meaningful networking and, consequently, the development of new projects. We can help you start your own group!
R4DS in Spanish + datos package: the resources to learn R in English are many, awesome, online, and free. But in Latin America few people can afford to learn English, and the resources in Spanish are few. To help solve this problem, we community-translated to Spanish the “R for Data Science” book and developed a package with the translation of all the datasets used in it: datos. The workflow to contribute to the package was designed to engage first-time contributors, and is now guiding the development of a new version in Portuguese that will be released in the next few months.
#DatosDeMiércoles + #30díasdegráficos: The @R4DS_es Twitter account was created as a way to share projects like the R4DS translation and to develop initiatives to foster the Spanish-speaking R community, like #datosdemieRcoles, the Latin American cousin of #TidyTuesday. The idea is not only to use datasets that are in Spanish, but also datasets that are relevant for our Region. This initiative has been complemented with the 30 days plot challenge #30díasdegráficos. If you want to participate proposing a dataset for #datodemiéRcoles, please visit our github repo.
The Carpentries: The Carpentries builds global capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. Building a sustainable and active community in Latin America includes several initiatives: lesson translations, instructor training, workshop coordination, and fundraising. Get in touch with us through the mailing list and the carpentries-es channel at the Carpentries Slack workspace.
ReproHack: ReproHack is a growing community for researchers that are fighting the reproducibility crisis by sharing their experiences across disciplines. It is focused on organizing hackathons where participants attempt to reproduce published research from a list of proposed papers with public code and data. We are planning the first ReproHack in Spanish for October 2020 and you can get in touch with us through Twitter.
AI Inclusive: AI Inclusive is an organization that promotes diversity in the AI Community. We want to bring awareness around Artificial Intelligence issues and empower the community so they can enter in the AI field, a field that is not diverse at all. In December 2019, we had our launch events in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and San Francisco, California. Follow us and join us!
Data Latam: in May 2016 we started with the first Data Latam podcast, aimed at offering an easy entry point, in Spanish, to those interested in data science. We always ask our interviewees: “How did you get where you are?”, and the diversity of stories has been enormous. Today Data Latam is a Latin American community of professionals and academics, who apply data science in their day to day work and we invite you to participate!

What happens in the R Community doesn’t stay in the R Community. All the good practices of inclusive and diverse communities learned in several of the initiatives presented before, generate strong work teams within and beyond the R community. There is still a lot to be done, but what we’ve already achieved is very encouraging and provides a solid foundation for the future.

These initiatives are sustained by many people making a great, mostly volunteer, effort behind the scenes. Some of the challenges that the communities face are translated into multiple positives, sustained, and a lot of invisible hard work. Some of them are: finding international funding due to limited local options, translating content, joining forces across organizations, organizing regional conferences, and becoming active developers of the technology.

The Latin American R community is growing fast and so does the responsibility to make this growth solid and safe. Some of the future work that we, as community builders, look forward to fulfilling are: consolidating regional conferences with support of international sponsors; acquiring funding to sustain translations; amplifying the voices of regional minorities; importing educational material and work opportunities; connecting expats with their local communities; helping other groups such as RUGs and RLadies; connecting with other initiatives such as R-Forwards, Africa-R, MiR, among others; Increase our and other minorities representation in the R Core Team, the R Foundation, and the R Consortium.

Thank you! Please watch our useR! 2020 video on YouTube.

LatinR 2020 will be a virtual event!

Thu, 14 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Dear community:

As expected, the seriousness of the health situation in our region and the uncertainty it generates make it inevitable to cancel the on-site event in Montevideo. The in-person event in that city will be reschedule for 2021, on a date to be announced before the end of the year.

One of our goals in organizing LatinR has always been bringing together the Latin American R community, learning from the developments and research of its members, and generating bonds of collaboration and friendship. We do not want to lose that this year. In moments like these, having the opportunity to share with the community becomes even more valuable. That is why we have decided to organize an online activity on the dates when the conference was originally planned (October 7-9). We are still ironing out the characteristics of the event, so we hope to announce during the next weeks both the details of this activity, and the modes of participation.

In the meantime, take care.

See you (virtually) in October!

LatinR 2020 organizing team

Birds of a feather, drawn together

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

By Allison Horst, Curtis Kephart, and Yanina Bellini

Cross-posted:

Birds of a Feather banner for RStudio::conf(2020)!

The “Birds of a Feather” (BoF) sessions at the 2020 RStudio Conference were a place where R-users with similar backgrounds, interests, and aspirations could connect in a low-stress social setting. In other words - these sessions let “birds of a feather flock together.” Building on the 2019 conference swag, we rolled out a bunch of new BoF buttons for rstudio::conf 2020.

Here we’ll share the process for how some of the designs were created, including several that truly involved a flock of contributors (names for groups of birds are from Bird Spot).

Well, what can we realistically fit on a 1.5” button?

The cool and challenging thing about designing the BoF buttons was the size restriction. In a 1.5” button, we wanted to create designs that:

Reflect the group name and/or community
Include at least one bird
Are obviously distinguishable for each group
Add some readable text
Oh also, all while setting an approachable tone.

It turns out the answer to “What can you fit on a 1.5” button?” is…actually quite a lot. Here are a few of the designs:

Data science team leaders

Featuring 80’s beach volleyball sandpiper coach leading a team of R users:

Fun fact: a group of sandpipers can be called a fling or a bind.

Natural language processing

Featuring a wordy bird - a parrot!

Fun facts: Groups of parrots are sometimes called companies, a prattles, or pandemoniums. Also, parrots are the only birds that can use their feet (like hands) to serve themselves food. And one more thing - the text in the background of this design is a line from Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind (one of artist @allison_horst’s favorite books).

The spatially aware carrier pigeon…

…checking flight routes before setting off on their next delivery:

Fun fact: A group of pigeons is sometimes called a kit or a loft.

Community-driven designs

Several of the designs - especially R-Latin America, R-Africa, and R-Ladies - depended on recommendations, insights, and feedback from multiple members of those communities. Here, we’ll highlight elements and contributors of several community-driven designs.

R-Latin America

The R-Latin America BoF button was truly a collaborative effort, with every detail - from bird to branch - created based on ideas and input from R-Latin America community members. Massive thanks to the R-Latin America design contributors (and thank you to @yabellini for providing this compiled list & text):

Laura Ación, Marcela Alfaro, Yanina Bellini, Juliana Benitez (expert ornithologist!), Elio Campitelli, Paola Corrales, Florencia D’Andrea, Natalia da Silva, Priscilla Minotti; Riva Quiroga, Vilma Romero, Gabriela Sandoval, Heather Turner; and the LatinR Conference Community!

These contributors are from Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Perú, Uruguay and the UK, and belong to R-Ladies Chapters and R User Groups in these countries. The final picture was chosen for the vote of the broader LatinR Conference Community.

Here are some insights into the final design elements:

The bird species is the chingolo (Zonotrichia capensis) which was chosen because it seemed to be the bird that is native to many Latin American countries, and is also unique to Latin America. It was one of a number suggested by ornithologist Juliana Benitez!
The chingolo is standing on a tilde (“~”) branch, used in letter eñe (ñ)
The color bands on the tilde represent colors on flags for Latin American countries
The shape of Latin America is represented on the bird’s chest
The bright green background is a nod to the astonishing biodiversity in Latin America

AfricaR

The AfricaR BoF button was designed with suggestions and feedback from AfricaR community leaders Shelmith Kariuki and Dennis Irorere.

Some design elements for the AfricaR button:

The colors (orange, purple and black) are borrowed from (and inspired by) the existing Africa R Users hex design
The shape of the continent is in orange (and outlined by data points, with a ggplot-inspired background grid)
The ostrich was suggested by Shelmith and Dennis as a representative bird

R-Ladies

The R-Ladies BoF button started with an idea from R-Ladies founder Gabriela de Quiroz, who suggested a gull as a nod to both R-Ladies’ beginnings in San Francisco, and to this year’s conference location!

With feedback from Gabriela and the R-Ladies leadership team including Laura Ación and Erin LeDell, and RStudio’s Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, the final design features the following elements:

A flock (or colony) of gulls, species chosen because it’s common to San Francisco, where R-Ladies began!
The gulls are riding an updraft of air together
The purple-to-black gradient is inspired by the R-Ladies color scheme

The whole collection

This year, there were 24(!) different Birds of a Feather buttons. When we put them all together, here’s the flock for the 2020 conference (with more planned for next year):

We hope that everyone can find a bird that they relate to, and we look forward to meeting many of you at future RStudio Conference BoF sessions!

So, just one final question: Which bird(s) are you?

The latinr package lets you create and submit presentations to LatinR

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing: latinr, the R package

In this edition of LatinR we showcase a new way of submit presentations entirely from your R session!

The aim is to make the whole process of creating, formatting and submitting your work as easy as possible. With the latinr package you can write your presentation using R Markdown adding the submission details in the header, compile it to PDF using the conference template and then submit it without the need of filling any form.

Note that none of this is at all mandatory. If you don’t feel comfortable using R Markdown, you can use whatever other tool you enjoy to create your PDF, and if you prefer, you can always use the EasyChair web interface to submit your work.

Also note that article submission is somewhat experimental at the moment, which means that if you do use it, go to the EasyChair website to be certain that your submission is correct.

Creating LatinR submissions with latinr

First things first, you need to install the package using devtools::install_github("latinr/latinr").

If you use RStudio, you can create an R Markdown template by going to File -> New File -> R Markdown -> From Template and selection “LatinR submission article”. There, you can name your file, select its folder and then press OK to create a base file you can begin to complete.

You’ll notice that all the submission details are handled by the header. You can complete them there or the function latinr::latinr_wizard() to launch a graphical user interface that will guide you through the process and finally show you a valid header that you can copy and paste into your file.

Alternatively you can use the wizard and click “Save” (on the top-right corner) to create the same base file but pre-populated. In any case, the R Markdown file should look something like this:

The first chunk performs some basic checks on the metadata each time the file is rendered. We recommend to leave it there so that any error comes to light as soon as possible. The rest is the R Markdown demo document. You can “knit” it to test that you’ve got the proper LaTeX installation and then start writing your presentation for LatinR!

Submitting an article with latinr

So far, latinr allows you to create a correctly anonymised PDF following the conference template. You can send it manually through the EasyChair website or, if you like, using latinr.

In any case, you’ll need to sing up at EasyChair. Then, you can optionally save your login details using lating::latinr_password_set(), which will promt you for your username and password. This is not mandatory but can make things easier. You might need to install que keyring package, in which case you’ll get an informative error.

Finally, the submission is done with latinr::latinr_submit(). By default it checks if there’s a single .Rmd file in the current working directory and, if it finds it, takes it as the file to be submitted. Then, it will should you the submission details so you can check that everything is correct, it then renders and shows you the resulting PDF so you can also verify it, and finally it performs the submission.

Optionally, in case you have a PDF created by any other medium, you can pass its path as an argument and use the .Rmd only to populate the submission details.

As we said before, this process is somewhat experimental an integration with web forms is notoriously complex. For that reason, it is of the utmost importance that you go to the EasyChair website to ascertain that your submission has gone through correctly. In the event of any error, you can always correct them manually.

Absolutely optional

Each step of the process is completely optional. You can use latinr to create and submit your work, only to create it, only to submit it, or not at all. Do whatever makes you more comfortable!

But if you do use latinr and find any error o have any suggestion, then don’t hesitate to contact us! The best way is by opening an issue on the GitHub repository or sending us a message through our Slack, or you can email the package maintainer with packageDescription("latinr")$Maintainer. This is all new to us and we wish to leverage the community to improve it for the future!

R Conferences in Latin America during 2020

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

1º semester

18/4/2020 - SatuRday Santiago. Santiago de Chile, Chile
19/5/2020 - V International Seminar on Statistics with R. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

2º semester

7/10/2020 - LatinR - Conferencia Latinoamericana sobre Uso de R en Investigación + Desarrollo- Montevideo, Uruguay

To be determined

SatRday São Paulo. São Paulo, Brasil.
SatRday Concepcion. Concepción, Chile.

If you know of any event that is not on the list, please send us an email at latinr.conf@gmail.com.

Call for Papers

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

LatinR2020 <- Latin American Conference about the Use of R in Research + Development

This 2020 LatinR keeps on wantering through the contintn. This year, the third edition of the confernece will take place in Montevideo, Uguruay October 7th through 9th 2020. Following previous schedules, it will consist of a first day for workshops and two days for the conference proper.

In this first announcement we outline topics of interest, presentation guidelines and important dates for proposal submission.

Topics of interest

Presentation guidelines

Oral presentations

Communications about research results, progress reports, or specific developments that, because their originality or potential applications in the use or development of R in academia or industry, is of interest to the regional community of R users. Presenters will have 15 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A.

Submissions must include a summary of no more than two pages including text, tables and figures. For the case of projects including Shiny applications or other interactive formats, they must also include the URL in which the application is available.

Posters/Lightning talks

Posters allow researchers and professionals to present and discuss their latest advances, ideas, ongoing research, and experiences or challenges related to the topics of interest of LatinR. Presenters should choose between poster format or a 5 minutes lightning talk.

Submissions must include a summary of no more than two pages including text, tables and figures.

Round tables

Round tables bring together researchers and professionals to present different viewpoints about a common topic. Proposals must consider one moderator and between 3 and 4 presenters.

The format will be as follows. First, a five minute introductory presentation by the moderator. Since LatinR gathers people from a great variety of disciplines, this introduction is meant to familiarise the audience with the particular topic of the round table. It should also explicitly state the connection of each presenter to the topic. Then, each presenter will have a maximum of 15 minutes. At the end, there will be 15 minutes for Q&A with the audience.

We are particularly interested in lineups that include presenters from diverse backgrounds (different institutions, countries, areas of research, gender, etc…) and show different methodologies and approaches to the subject.

Submissions must include:

a general description of the round table with 150 word limit.
a summary of each presentation with a one page limit including text, tables and figures.

Important dates

Abstract submission start: March 2nd 2020

Abstract submission deadline: May 30th 2020

Abstract acceptance notification: July 2020

Abstract final version submission and author registration deadlines: July 2020

LatinR 2020: October 7th through 9th 2020

Submission guidelines

The official languages of the conference are Spanish, Portuguese and English. Abstracts must be written in the same language of the oral presentation or poster.
Submissions must be sent in PDF format without author name or institution through the EasyChair platform following this link from March 2nd to April 30th.
Submissions must respect the oficla conference format. You can use the Word or LaTeX template, or use the latinr to ensure a correct submission.
The submission process will be handled through the EasyChair platform from March 2nd through April 20th.
Submissions must be send in PDF format withouth author or affiliation information through the EasyChair platform.
For round tables, presentation summaries must be included in the same file.
Each submission will be carefully evaluated by out Scientific Committee (announcement forthcoming) regarding their originality, contribution, technical qualities and clarity.

Registration

At least one author from each oral communication, poster or round table presentation must be registered for participating in the conference.

Presentations and posters from previous versions

In this repository you can find the titles of every presentation and posters from the 2018 edition and in this repository, all works from the 2019 version. Use it to get a feel for the themes and submissions accepted in previous editions.

LatinR Slack - Code of Conduct

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome!

The LatinR Slack is a virtual space dedicated to meet and share experiences with attendees, authors and organizers of LatinR before and during the conference.

Everyone in this workspace is required to agree with the following code of conduct. Organisers will enforce this code throughout the event and previous months. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody. Please be welcoming, be kind and look out for each other.

We want this to be a fun, friendly, and harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), ideology or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. Discriminatory jokes and sexual language and imagery are not appropriate in any channel or direct messages.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the workspace and/or the conference with no refund.

Also we expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.

Neep help?

If you need help about the use of Slack, please comment in the #dudas channel so everybody can help you. If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the administrators immediately. Conference staff will be happy to assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference.

LatinR Code of Conduct

Adapted from http://confcodeofconduct.com.

Code of Conduct

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone at our conference are required to agree with the following code of conduct. Organisers will enforce this code throughout the event. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.

The Quick Version

LatinR is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), ideology or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter, and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers.

The Less Quick Version

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology, technology choices, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund. If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified as they’ll be wearing branded badges. Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact venue security, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.

We expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.

Need Help?

Please contact a member of the LatinR 2019 staff. They will be wearing branded badges during the conference. You can also reach us through latinrconf@gmail.com.

Adapted from http://confcodeofconduct.com.

Attributions

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Attribution of the images used in this website:

Photo of Buenos Aires’ coast: José María Pérez Nuñez

Subway photo: Thomas Hobbs

Graffiti photo: Christian Jiménez

Star icon: Star from Landan Lloyd from the Noun Project.

Newsstand photo: Zhu

interview by Jesus Puertas from the Noun Project