Our Community Call on December 15th covered a big topic in tech communities: “How do I create a code of conduct for my event/lab/codebase?". Here, we cover some of the key themes and considerations that arose from the discussion and point to curated resources and examples to follow when developing a code of conduct (CoC) for your community. Three guest speakers shared different perspectives. Dr Pauline Barmby talked about the process and lessons learned as Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry recently updated their CoC; Ms Safia Abdalla talked about “Codes of conduct for open source: the stuff no one tells you”; and Dr Titus Brown talked about his lab CoC.

rOpenSci’s overarching mission is to promote a culture of transparent, open, and reproducible research across various scientific communities. All of our activities are geared towards lowering barriers to participation, and building a community of practitioners around the world. In addition to developing and maintaining a large suite of open source tools for data science, we actively support the research community with expert review on research software development, community calls, and hosting annual unconferences around the world.

This week the folks at Github have open sourced their fork of libcmark (based on the extensive PR by Mathieu Duponchelle), which they use to render markdown text within documents, issues, comments and anything else on the Github website. The new release of the commonmark R package incorporates this library so that we can take advantage of Github quality markdown rendering in R. The most exciting change is that the library has gained an extension mechanism to provide optional rendering features which are missing from the commonmark spec.

Geospatial data - data embedded in a spatial context - is used across disciplines, whether it be history, biology, business, tech, public health, etc. Along with community contributors, we’re working on a suite of tools to make working with spatial data in R as easy as possible. If you’re not familiar with geospatial tools, it’s helpful to see what people do with them in the real world. Example 1 One of our geospatial packages, geonames, is used for geocoding, the practice of either sorting out place names from geographic data, or vice versa.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting written or typed text from images such as photos and scanned documents into machine-encoded text. The new rOpenSci package tesseract brings one of the best open-source OCR engines to R. This enables researchers or journalists, for example, to search and analyze vast numbers of documents that are only available in printed form. People looking to extract text and metadata from pdf files in R should try our pdftools package.