This note celebrates useR! 2019 in Toulouse by listing a few links about R conferences in France and some resources for French R users.

My Twitter feed is currently offering me lots of links to slides that are being presented at useR! 2019 in Toulouse. The hashtag is #useR2019, and you can get most of the material through GitHub, where someone has, as is usual during such conferences, started to compile all the material: thank you, Suthira Owlarn.

So far, my favourite find in the material being presented is Dmytro Perepolkin’s talk on, and package for, polite scraping. I also plan to take a look at Timothée Giraud’s cartography (thematic maps), Anqi Fu and Balasubramanian Narasimhan’s CVXR (convex optimization), and Dianne Cook’s tutorial on visualising high-dimensional data.

Other French R meetings

As far as I know, this is the second time that the useR! conference happens in France: the first time was ten years ago, in Rennes. The past events Web page of the useR! 2019 website gives a few more clues about other R conferences in France:

… most members of the organizing committee were previously involved in the organization of the Journées Françaises de Statistique in 2013 and in the French R meeting in 2016.

The Journées Françaises de Statistique is an event held by the Société Française de Statistique (SFdS), which has been sponsoring French R conferences for a long time, as have the Société Française de Biométrie (SFB) and several research organizations involved in disciplines including mathematics, computer science, agriculture and ecology.

The “French R meeting” mentioned in the quote above is called Rencontres R and has been happening since 2012. Since there does not seem to be a public listing of all its editions, here is my own index of their websites:

• useR! 2009 Rennes
• Rencontres R 2012 Bordeaux (announcement)
• Rencontres R 2013 Lyon
• Rencontres R 2014 Montpellier
• Rencontres R 2015 Grenoble
• Rencontres R 2016 Toulouse
• Rencontres R 2017 Anglet
• Rencontres R 2018 Rennes
• useR! 2019 Toulouse
• Rencontres R 2020 AgroParisTech (forthcoming)

Local French R meetings

There are tons of local French R meetings; one that I remember vividly from a few years ago was called FL\tauR, and was attended and organised by lots of people from Insee, the French official statistics agency.

As of today, the only local groups that I keep an eye on are the R Addicts Paris Meetup group, the Semin-R conference and the RUSS (R à l’Usage des Sciences Sociales) seminar, all of which are located in Paris.

R resources for French users

You will find many more links to French R conferences and groups on the frrrenchies Web page maintained by Paul-Antoine Chevalier and others.

The page lists many useful help resources for French speakers, such as the r-grrr Slack channel, but its most important section, to me, is the part where it lists R packages with specific relevance to users working on French (administrative, geographic, etc.) data.

You might also be interested in my note on French R conference sponsors.

Update (July 16, 2019): thanks as always to R Weekly for mentioning this note.