Jun 12, 2025
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54 min
Posit Conf 2025 Keynote Previews | Kieran Healy & Jonathan McPherson | Data Science Hangout
To join future data science hangouts, add it to your calendar here: https://pos.it/dsh - All are welcome! We’d love to see you! Thursdays at 12PM US Eastern
We were recently joined by upcoming Posit Conf 2025 keynote speakers Kieran Healy, Professor of Sociology at Duke University, and Jonathan McPherson, Software Architect at Posit PBC, to chat about how and why open-source IDEs like RStudio and Positron get made, how to do data visualization for discovery and explanation, what their keynotes are going to be about, and what’s next for Posit’s IDE development, including AI integration.
In this Hangout, Kieran talked about the trustworthy data visualization. He highlighted that while data visualization is a powerful way to condense and present information, often creating compelling and authoritative artifacts, phrases like “visual storytelling” can be problematic if they encourage presenting a predetermined narrative not fully supported by data. He emphasized that the trustworthiness of visualizations does not come solely from the techniques used or the software, but from a “web of social processes and individual commitments” that cannot be easily automated.
Jonathan talked about the future of Positron and its relationship with RStudio, addressing whether Positron is intended to replace RStudio. He clarified that the long-term goal for Positron is to make it the best Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for working with data in any language. He explained that Positron is built with an extensibility layer, allowing anyone to write plugins for new languages or capabilities, making it a robust and evolving data science workbench. It does not have all of RStudio’s features and makes different design trade-offs. RStudio, having evolved over decades, is highly optimized for specific R-based workflows and remains the best at what it does for those use cases.
Resources mentioned in the video and zoom chat: Posit Conference 2025 Registration → https://posit.co/conference/ Kieran Healy’s Website → https://kieranhealy.org Kieran Healy’s book “The Ordinal Society” → https://theordinalsociety.com/ Kieran Healy’s book “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction” → https://socviz.co/ Jonathan McPherson’s LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanmcpherson Joe Cheng’s AI Talk on Harnessing LLMs for Data Analysis → https://youtu.be/owDd1CJ17uQ?feature=shared TidyTuesday GitHub → https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday Positron IDE → https://positron.posit.co/ Will R Chase’s talk on making clear plots → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cTacaWE6I If you didn’t join live, one great discussion you missed from the zoom chat was about the ongoing debate and practical tips for moving from presenting tables of numbers to visualizations. Community members shared various strategies, including using color-mapped tables as an intermediate step, providing both tables and visuals, and ensuring accessibility and interpretability for diverse audiences. Are you team tables or team graphs?
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Jonathan McPherson, Joe Cheng
Positron
rstudio
