What’s New in R: December 1, 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a fun Halloween-themed {ggplot2} tutorial (yes, I’m a bit late on this), a package for creating Gantt charts, and a fascinating talk on automating election night reporting with R and Quarto. Let’s dive in!
Neon Ghosts with ggplot2
Athanasia Monika Mowinckel creates a delightful Halloween-themed tutorial on making glowing, wiggly neon ghosts using {ggplot2}. While the subject matter is playful, the post teaches valuable techniques including shape generation with randomization, layering multiple geoms for visual effects, and creating custom plotting functions. It’s a fun way to learn about polygon manipulation, color layering, and other advanced {ggplot2} features that you can apply to more serious visualizations.
{ganttify}
The {ganttify} package, developed by Ahmed Aredah, provides tools for creating interactive gantt charts. Built on top of {plotly}, the package offers rich, interactive visualizations for project planning and management. It supports multiple coloring modes, making it flexible for different project visualization needs and particularly useful for anyone managing complex projects with multiple activities and dependencies.
Election Night Reporting Using R & Quarto
Andrew Heiss and Gabe Osterhout present a compelling case study from posit::conf(2025) on how the Idaho Secretary of State’s office used R and Quarto to modernize their election night reporting system. The talk covers the complete workflow from database connections with {dbplyr} to creating interactive maps with {leaflet} and tables with {reactable}, all automated using {targets} pipelines. They demonstrate how they built a system that updated every 90 seconds on election night, handling over 400 races while maintaining perfect accuracy — all without leaving the R ecosystem.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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