Issue 2025-W10 Highlights

A major milestone for leveraging LLMs in R just landed with the new ellmer package, along with a terrific showcase of retrieval-augmented generation combining ellmer and DuckDB. Plus an inspiring roundup of the recent Closeread contest winners.
Episode Links

• This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @[email protected] (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter)
• Announcing ellmer: A package for interacting with Large Language Models in R
• Rapid RAG Prototyping: Building a Retrieval Augmented Generation Prototype with ellmer and DuckDB
• Winners of the Closeread Prize – Data-Driven Scrollytelling with Quarto
• Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2025-W10

Supplement Resources

• Coder Radio episode 608 - R with Eric Nantz https://coder.show/608
• nhyris - The minimal framework for transform R shiny application into standalone

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• Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback
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• Get in touch with us on social media
  • Eric Nantz: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter)
  • Mike Thomas: @[email protected] (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter) 

Music credits powered by OCRemix

• Watermelon Flava - Breath of Fire III - Joshua Morse, posu yan - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01411
• Stomp the Summer Sky - Secret of Mana - Ziwtra - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00859