Grazing on the periphery

It has been a great week for grazing … much of it enabled by Mara Averick’s open sharing.
It started with news of Alison Hill’s speakerdeck presentation.

Alison discusses courage, enchantment, permission, persistence and trust as elements of creative learning. She concludes with this slide:

What fascinated me about Alison’s presentation was her synthesis of profound ideas about sharing and learning with each other in an aesthetic that grabbed and held my attention for 94 slides.
She is part of a remarkable R community that shares openly.
Three other members of this community enabled even more grazing this week. Each offered me possibilities to extend my knowledge of visualisation using R.
Matt Dancho has shared the Anomalize package that enables a “tidy” workflow for detecting anomalies in time series data. There is a vignette for the package to share the process of identifying these events. I think this will be very helpful in my performance research as I investigate seasonal and trend behaviours.
Ulrike Groemping shared the prepplot package in which “a figure region is prepared, creating a plot region with suitable background color, grid lines or shadings, and providing axes and labeling if not suppressed. Subsequently, information carrying graphics elements can be added”.  There is a detailed vignette to support the package.
Guangchuang Yu shared the ggplotify package that converts “plot function call (using expression or formula) to ‘grob’ or ‘ggplot’ object that compatible to the ‘grid’ and ‘ggplot2’ ecosystem”.  Guangchang shares a detailed vignette that illustrates the potential of the package.
Mara, Alison, Matt, Ulrike and Guangchuand epitomise for me the delights in open sharing. A post in The Scholarly Kitchen, written by Alice Meadows, added to my grazing on the margins of openly sharing.

In the post Alice shares a wide range of resources. She makes a particular mention of the Metadata 2020 project that is “a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society.”
The opportunities for such collaboration are increasing as we find new ways to share synchronously and asynchronously. These become easier as we make a bold decision to think out loud and share our thoughts with others.
Alison’s presentation includes this slide as a stimulus for that sharing:

This sharing permits grazing for me in the sense of the word used in Leonard Cohen’s Preface to the Chinese translation of his collection of Beautiful Losers poems includes this passage:

When I was young, my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself, were much affected by those ancient songs. … So you can understand, Dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment, and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.

Photo Credits

Slide grabs from Alison Hill’s speakerdeck.
Pictures from Twitter and Beuth Hochschule.
Collaboration image from Alice Meadow’s post.